Over the past few months I’ve had to make frequent use of Ireland’s property listing sites. Daft.ie is far and away the best site out there for finding a property but it wouldn’t be that hard to write something better. The most important thing to me is the search function. Here are some important points to consider for any property listing application.

These aren’t going to be on every persons list but if you implement them correctly, they are going to make your site a lot easier to use.

• Don’t be afraid to add too many options
  You can hide them behind advanced tabs and expanding sections but please don’t leave me with max, min and location. I don’t want to go through every letting in Dublin City.
• Use free tagging
  Its a lot cheaper to add free tagging to the add property screen with auto complete for popular tags than trying to keep a track of what people are looking for currently in houses.
• Right input control for a piece of information
  If you have a large number of locations to choose from, don’t make me use a multi select box, I’m not going to hold down the ctrl button every time and at some stage I’m going to click away accidentally. Use a number of check boxes, that way I’m not getting frustrated on your site.  Similarly, don’t use a drop down, very few people decide I want to live in that particular town, most people decice I want to live within easy access of work or loved ones, drop downs just don’t suit it. Just think about it.
• Save my searches
  It can take a while for me to enter in every location I want to live in, particularly when they are all spread out along bus routes, so please for the sake my mental stability provide me with a save function. This makes sense from a usability point of view but it also makes sense in that it helps lock users into your system. Daft have the email system which is meant to send you an email whenever a property matching your criteria comes on the market. Very clever but like their save search function it doesn’t allow you to use the advanced search functions (with the time consuming options) thus defeating the whole purpose.
• Let me know if I’ve viewed this ad before
  I don’t know how many people I’ve called up at this stage but at once but undoubtedly I’ve missed properties that I hadn’t seen thinking I had or called up advertisers twice thinking I hadn’t read the ad. If there is an option to login, why isn’t there a function that tells me I’ve seen this one already.
• Give me all the properties that are beside a public transport route to location X
  Daft claims it can do it, I found it just gave me a lot of properties around town. Why aren’t myhome, property.ie and let.ie trying to up the ante?
• Google Maps
  Its free, there is no reason not to use it and its woefully underused by property websites, don’t just show the property I’m looking at in the area. Show all the properties that match my search too, and while you’re at it, allow me to define the area in which I want you to search for properties with google maps.

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