For many years the Irish property marketing industry has been dominated by Daft.ie, a joint venture between Adevinta and the portal’s founders Eamonn and Brian Fallon, and MyHome.ie which is owned by The Irish Times. The industry may be about to be shaken up though thanks to Love Property, a new venture being launched by brothers Hugo and Conor Mahony, which sees property search from a different perspective.
The new portal makes heavy use of social media and already has over 65,000 followers across all their curated listings accounts on Instagram, a platform which the portal itself takes inspiration from. The loveproperty.ie website is laid out and organised around a series of themed feeds much like those seen on Instagram and “features all the best listings that come on the market in Ireland under different categories in a vertically scrollable feed that becomes tailored to each user based on their preferences and favorites” according to a company press release.
The beta version of the company’s platform went live in November and has apparently seen 200,000 unique users in the last month. Several major agency names are already signed up to advertise, and Love Property co-founder and Chief Executive Hugo Mahony says his portal will provide much-needed competition in the market:
“Our plan is to build Love Property to a name synonymous with property in Ireland and provide meaningful competition in the portal space. We will achieve this with an effective marketing strategy and by providing consumers with a radically different experience to existing platforms. For agents and other advertisers, we aim to provide them with choice and exceptional value for advertising on a new and exciting platform.
“Our beta phase has proven that most importantly users are interested in what we have to offer and we’ll continue to grow our audience and shape the product until it perfectly fits users’ needs”.
Mahony told Online Marketplaces that the company’s immediate focus would be on making some improvements to the platform and integrating more AI functionality to improve the personalization of each property feed. Love Property also plans to work with mortgage providers and banks and follow the worldwide property portal trend of offering mortgage tools on-site.
