Around the PPW office we’re always hearing of new portals with crazy names. So we thought we’d put together a list of our favourites.
One of them would have to be Irish, wouldn’t it? daft.ie – really, it’s just plain crazy. But don’t be fooled, it’s the number one player in the Irish market.
Israel weighs in with homeless.co.il.
In the UK it’s all wordplay: findaproperty.com versus propertyfinder.com. It’s just plain confusing. Maybe that’s the point?
Italians are crazy about casa and clicking: casa.it, casaclick.it and clickcase.it to name a few.
We also think it’s worth mentioning enormo.com (formerly properazzi.com) who’ve come under a lot of fire for using what some have called a “porn name”.
In Africa, there’s skilpad.com, which takes some explaining. The company’s website says that skilpad is the Afrikaans word for tortoise: “nobody takes real estate more seriously than the tortoise, who carries his house with him wherever he goes! The tortoise is also a symbol of survival and reliability, outperforming the flashy hare who is here today and gone tomorrow.” No, really. Stop it with the metaphors!
India’s contributions to our list are the eerie magicbricks.com and the vast 99acres.com and realacres.com.
Hong Kong gives us the rather tiny squarefoot.com.hk and (I wish I could) gohome.com.hk.
Then there are the multitudes of whacky Zs the world over: zoocasa.com, zoomf.com, zoopla.co.uk, zameen.com, zhufang.com, and zillow.com.
At the other end of the spectrum, lacking in imagination altogether is Australia’s realestate.com.au. It certainly does what it says.
And we’ve always had a soft spot for the broody instincts of nestoria.co.uk and roost.com.
After some heated debate we took a vote, and our final top 5 crazy names for property portals is:
Fifth place: gohome.com.hk
Fourth: magicbricks.com
Third: skilpad.com
Second: homeless.co.il
…and a drumroll for first place which we’re awarding to: daft.ie
Tell us what you think…
[image: flickr/purpleslog]
Advertising Partner
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting article. Having deliberated for months and months over whether to use a generic or ‘made-up’ real estate name for our new Hong Kong property search engine we came up with ‘Bindoa.com’, which is a bit of word play for the Cantonese phrase ”Bin Dou ahhh” which translates to ”Where is it?”. What do you think?
Out of the list I like zillow.. zillions of data + so easy to use you can rest your head on a pillow (zillion + pillow) = zillow. genius!
Emma,
Thanks very much for the award! Just so your readers can understand why we called our site Daft.ie; It was a very deliberate strategy to build a consumer brand around online property.
When we launched the brand 11 years ago, we wanted a name that was easy to remember and fresh because we were trying to target a brand at the demand side of the market (ie renters and buyers) and not the supply side (agents, sellers and landlords).
I believe our primary focus on developing a consumer internet brand has allowed us to get higher-than-average penetration in online real estate classifieds for a no.1 site compared to other markets (1 million uniques per month for a 4m population). By the way we also run alternative sites with the generic names property.ie and rent.ie which helps us when selling to agents, however the vast majority of traffic (95%) still comes to Daft.ie
Regards,
Eamonn
Hi, Emma:
Very interesting article. Well, at least there’s still creativity, even bad creativity out there.
Thanks again for the great post.
Misty
You should also write about http://www.rentinsingapore.com a good website I use in Singapore
By the way, there is another Gohome.hr (a Croatian aggregator) and a cool Russian website called Domania.ru (Dom means house in Russian, so the brand is kind of mania about homes or all about homes or being mad about homes.
How about mouseprice.com?!
Here is one more addition to your list
.
Jaeydaad means property in Urdu and Hindi. Jaeydaad.com is a Real Estate Portal covering major cities of Pakistan. Yes its free to browse and post.
Thanks for writing this list.
jaeydaad.com
please look it also as a property protal site in India