Acording to James Corbett, the daft.ie owners are coy about the possibility of selling. I have no inside knowledge, although I love the site, which is still the best property site in Ireland by far.

But the owners have some hard decisions to make.

There are people with big money and serious resources who can do them serious damage. The myhome.ie team doesn’t really understand why its website is so unusable and useless at the moment, but they will eventually figure it out. Then, they will be able to use their money to really hurt daft.

At the same time, Daft hasn’t built up its own partnerships or its own contracts. One of the owners was on the radio telling us about his plans to get into foreign property. Obviously there are opportunities, but it seems like a very poor strategy for the daft.ie business. It’s too big a diversification, the owners don’t really understand it, it’s a rough, unregulated market and it isn’t necessarily going to be all that profitable unless the company can get global or at least European scale (which seems unlikely, but is certainly possible).

Daft.ie are the good guys. Unlike James, I can understand why they want to hold on to it, it’s their baby, and in most ways they are doing a fantastic job. If they sold it, what would they do then? Do they really need a pile of money? I hope they make the right strategic decisions so that the site can be around for a long time. They should do it for the users.