Has anyone noticed strange behaviour on myhome.ie?
When I did a search I can only get the first 4 or 5 pages, it then goes back to the search page.
It looks like they really fixed it

Also, a property I've been following (out of curiosity, close to a relative's place), has a link which no longer works:
http://www.myhome.ie/search/property.asp?id=313215 instead saying
"This property has been updated, please search for it again below"

It's gone to here :
http://www.myhome.ie/search/property.asp?id=SSJIB313215

In other words, they changed the ID from 313215 to SSJIB313215 (but in fact no price drop this time, this was previously on IPW with a 20k drop).

That'll really please the all the hordes who've been trying to follow various properties!

Irish Times - 05/10/2007
Property website blocks bloggers compiling lists of house prices
Paul Cullen, Consumer Affairs Correspondent

Leading property website Myhome.ie has blocked access to bloggers who have been compiling lists recording the steep falls in house prices over the past year.

The website denied it was restricting information that might be of use to housebuyers and said it took the action last week to protect its good name and prevent breaches of the law.

"Anyone who is interested in buying a particular house will know already if the price has dropped," said 's chief executive Jim Miley.

A number of websites track house price changes, but until recently this was done manually. The process was then automated when unknown individuals devised web trawling software which searches through the main Irish property websites and identifies price changes over time.

However, last week Myhome, which is owned by Irish Times Ltd changed its format so that the names and prices of houses are now embedded in images.

This means they cannot be picked up by web trawling software; a side-effect is that they will not be picked up by Google searches.

The change creates difficulty for visually-impaired users, who rely on magnification of text to make websites more readable.

Mr Miley said Myhome would be in breach of its contract with housesellers if it allowed "spurious" data, which was often inaccurate, to be gathered.

The lists infringed Myhome's copyright and breached data protection laws, Mr Miley added, and they created confusion with the website's own reports on property trends.

These do not identify changes in the prices of individual houses but Mr Miley said future reports would provide more detailed information on local trends. The site is also to be redesigned to allow for individual house searches, he said, and the issue of access for the visually-impaired would be addressed at that point.

A spokesman for the Data Protection Commissioner said the use of people's addresses by third parties could involve breaches of data protection laws.

Another leading property website, Daft.ie, said it was "comfortable" with the web trawling software: "It's information in the public domain so we don't see why it should be hidden."

© 2007 The Irish Times

How on earth is it a breach of contract?
Their contract is to advertise the house and it's price which is available publically. What's the difference between an automated one and a manual search besides its efficiency?
IT have a lot to answer for here, limp article but they're obviously compromised, national paper of record my hole.
Hopefully Soma has got a work around in place for reading the images prices. Brass necks to try and hide information!

The VI's don't want any recording of price drops especially when they make a mockery of the ESRI. Good for paul Cullen to write that article, he takes a neutral view. Somehow I wish The Irish Times would change their name to The Vested Interests.

Yes you're right of course they don't.
So we have the esri in one corner where they are effectively picking a number that TSB can live with and hope is reasonably plausible.
IN the the other corner we have the commendable work of IPW which unfortunately can only access asking price information and not actual sales figures. Then we have no real information on sales volumes.
Would not be hard to get real, comprehensive up to date information if there was a will to do it. How would one go about getting some change on this? The only routes i can think of right now are,

Petetition signed and handed to some form of representative
Work with your local TD
Call Joe Duffy One call to his show has resulted in thousands of mobiles gone from prison cells.
Put pressure on banks, they would have the info i would imagine.

When i think about it. i don't think there are enough people who understand the market to make any of the above worthwhile. Too many people looking to sell on to the next level of the pyramid scheme/

WTF. So if I look up a property that my missus says she is now interested in, it will tell me how much it has dropped by?????

Myhome.ie must have got serious heat from Estate Agents. They must have threatened a boycott of the Irish Times property section if they are getting a full site redesign. As daft.ie is only online, perhaps they couldn't use the same strong arm tactics.

Maybe you should write to them and ask for a price history for a property you are interested in.

I was curious about these statements:





From a glance at the Data Protection Commissioners website it would appear to a layperson that the key phrase here is "the use of people's addresses by third parties". How it is used its key, not the act of collating information ni the public domain. IPW isn't contacting them, selling on the information, or using it for any purpose beyond the initial use by Myhome.

As for breach of copyright. Yeh right.

Total rubbish.

Firstly, if the data is spurious, then it's Myhomes fault for publishing spurious data!

Secondly, on copyright, no breach of copyright is occuring. The property is being openly and publically advertised for sale. So long as the '3rd party' is not republishing either in part or in whole the actual web page then no breach has occured (this also goes to the Research vs Plagiarism arguement). To suggest infringement of copyright is akin to suggesting a newspaper has breach copyright by printing the scores at a football game.

Finally, on the Data Protection Act. The address of the property has been supplied to myhome by, or on behalf of, the vendor inorder to sell the property. Publication of this data by myhome could be seen as a breach of the DPA, but certainly no infringement has been comitted by any 3rd patry browsing/trawling the site, so long as they do not us that data or pass it on.

Total rubblish, one assumes that the gentleman in the article knows this too.

Blue Horseshoe

I'm pretty sure; no certain, the Irish Times would advocate freedom of information and a free open market, as important tenets of a liberal progressive society. I refuse to believe that the Irish Times, (Ltd or otherwise) would seek to quash the flow of information in the public domain in a free market. I mean how bad would that look? The hyprocisy for Gods sake!. How could they possibly preach liberal ideals again?. They would look compromised, furtive, partial, foolish.

one could always tell the Phoenix who thoroughly enjoy reminding the IT of their 'stated values'

The vested interests at MyHome.ie are 1) The Estate Agents 2) The shareholders 3) Property Developers.
If trends in property are going down none of the above will be pleased as people are not going to buy, hence the attempted blocking operation.
Without going into the legalities of what MyHome have been doing, in my opinion they will ultimately score an own goal because if I refer a house to some and they only get looking for it in a couple of days, that house could have literally"moved".
Technically the "Blocks" that MyHome have put in place can be overcome. It is a law of diminishing returns for them.

i noticed that about myhome when i was trying to scrape data, all house address and prices in an image! *very* easy to get around, it's just giving people a challenge.