Podcast: Eamonn Fallon, Daft.ie

07-11-2006

by Tom Raftery

In the third of a series of pre-event podcasts interviewing speakers attending the 2006 IT@Cork Business and Technology Conference, Tom talks to Eamonn Fallon, CEO and co-founder of Irish property website Daft.ie.

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Daft.ie was named in September as the most trafficked Irish website with over 38 million page impressions per month from 600,000 unique visitors by the independent website auditors ABCE.

Here are the questions Tom asked Eamonn, and the times he asked them:

Can you give us a bit of background on Daft.ie; how did it get set up? - 0:20

And what stage were you at in your own career at the time? - 02:12

How did you initially seed the word out to the letting agents and people who had property to rent that this was the place to go to? - 03:33

Was the business model at the time around charging the landlords for listing? - 05:02

Of course, with the continuing rise in property prices, people are looking to invest in property, and not just in Ireland... - 06:31

And are your buyers primarily Irish? - 07:08

And where did the domain name come from? - 07:57

The site was recently shown to be the most trafficked website in the country with something like 27 million page views per month... - 08:40

And this is despite the fact that we have between 6 percent and 7 percent of households with broadband? - 09:40

One of the other high-profile Irish sites is MyHome.ie (which sold recently for EUR50 million). MyHome.ie has a huge profile because of the big advertising campaign it undertook and yet you are beating it hands down for page views, how do you account for that? - 10:31

And you have over 40,000 listings on the site; what proportion of those would be Irish? - 12:12

And do you have any figures on sales? - 12:57

The Irish property market seems to be in the news all the time these days with people expecting a bust or a slowdown or a soft landing depending on who you listen to. What would be your own prediction for the Irish market? - 13:25

And will that affect your sales? - 15:17

You recently added a mapping service to the site, how does that work? - 15:58

And is that being used much? - 16:56

Is the foreign property market proving popular? - 17:17

And where is popular? - 18:20

And if you had a couple of million to invest yourself in property, where would you invest it? - 19:14

If you weren't in Daft.ie, what do you think you'd be doing? - 19:56

All content, including audio interviews is copyright of Tom Raftery of Podleaders.com. Tom is a podcaster, blogger and web marketing expert and is available for freelenace or full-time projects. You can see Tom's skills set here.