Some of the key findings include;

• Availability of mortgage credit is considered the most important factor affecting house prices this year.
  
  
• 38% of respondents intend to purchase a property in 2012
  
  
• 64% of people do not think current prices reflect good value in their region
  
  

The launch of the inaugural Daft.ie Consumers Attitude Survey gives us a deep insight into our consumers' perceptions of the state of the property market both nationally and locally, and it also gives us an indication of people's intention to participate within the property market. We believe these on-going surveys will act as an important indicator for measuring consumer sentiment.

The results of the survey are available from
http://www.daft.ie/research/2012_Consumer_Attitudes_Survey.pdf

More than 400 companies have listed their jobs on Adverts.ie so far, including Paddy Power, Apple, and Vodafone.

This cooperation between Daft and Adverts brings great news to all employers already posting on the site as their jobs will be now be viewed by more than 4.5 million unique browsers every month.We are offering free trials to all employers for a limited time only.

Please contact Nicola@adverts.ie to register an account today!

For those of you who are looking for a job, best of luck with your job search!

Every January at Daft we always see a big spike in traffic to our site and yesterday was no exception.

According to Google Analytics, yesterday (3rd January 2012) we experienced our busiest day on Daft to date. We delivered more than 7 million page impression to over 180,000 visitors. Looking at our server logs, at peak we were handling over 620 requests a second.

What’s even more interesting is that over 1.6 million of these pages (1,639,117 to be precise) were delivered to visitors using a mobile device - the Daft iPhone App delivered 904,448 impressions alone!

Just to put that in comparison, back in 2005 we issued a press release about our busiest day to date. Back then delivering 500,000 page impressions to 16,000 visitors was considered a busy day!

Another random interesting traffic stat for the day: Daft now has more iPad users than IE6 users!

Ciarán
@ciaranmaher

Oh and we're hiring..

As with our recent redesign of our property details page, one of our main aims here was to achieve a more modern look and feel, while continuing to highlight our most important and popular features.

Homepage

Our homepage now has a neater, fresher look. We've made a few subtle changes, which we feel gives the page a cleaner look, allowing you to more easily focus on the useful information on the page.

We've moved our "Recent Properties" showcase further up the page, allowing you to take a quick look at the latest properties being put up for sale around the country. You can get an even better look at our featured property in our “Property Spotlight” on the right hand side of the page, now that we've made the photo there even bigger.

You may have seen recent news coverage of several high profile property auctions. If you'd like to spend a bit of time taking a look at the properties before the next auction you can now use our "Auction properties" quick link, located just underneath the Sales search.

Search Results Page

The new design of our search results page has made it cleaner and even easier than before to get to the key details of each property within your search.

In keeping with the changes we made to our homepage, the photographs on this page are now larger than ever. We've also taken the key information for each property (price, bedrooms, property type) and placed them in their own distinct box at the top of each property result. This detail along with the larger photo should make it much quicker for you to determine whether or not you want to investigate a property further.

Hopefully there will be plenty of properties which interest you, but you may be busy so unable to give them all a closer look right now. Clicking the "add to saved ads" link will save this property for you to come back to a little bit later when you can spend some a bit more time investigating!

If you're an estate agent you may find our updated Featured Agent slot interesting. It's been given a lick of paint to bring it up to date with the rest of the new design, and will continue to highlight properties relevant to the user's current search.

Photo Gallery View

One of the themes of the new design was the introduction of ever-larger property photos. If you like bigger and brighter photographs, you may be interested in one of our better-kept secrets on Daft ... our Photo Gallery View!

Whenever you do a search on Daft, if you click on the "Photo Gallery View" tab towards the top you'll get the same search reformatted to use much larger photographs. Very handy if you want to take a quick look at the type of properties showing up in your search!

We hope you find these changes useful. User experience is very important to us and we would love to hear your feedback on the new design, either in the comments below or via email to support@daft.ie.

There are still a lot of changes still to come, so stay tuned...

A lot has changed! Aesthetically, it looks fresher with a cleaner layout. Our Developers have been working feverishly over the last few months to achieve a different, functional, contemporary look.

Here is a snapshot of improvements.

The first thing you notice is that the property photographs take centre stage on the page. The first image is larger with the introduction of thumbnails beneath. You can take a look inside the property and see if it's the one for you. So, remember photographs are of utmost importance!

We have made the ‘Contact Advertiser’ details more visible to the right of the photographs. There is also a text box to email the Advertiser.

Also made more visible are functions 'Save Ad', 'Share with Friends', 'Print this Page' and 'Report this Ad'

For the many tweeters among us- we have made it more visible on the top right hand side to tweet and share the ad on Facebook

The introduction of tabs has made it easier to evaluate the property in one fowl swoop. In the property overview tab, you can get the key details of the property at a quick glance and see where it's located. If you want to go in to more detail on the property, clicking "Show more information" will show you all of the description which the advertiser has shared, which could be anything from details of the local area right down to the measurements of the en-suite bathroom! Maneuvering across, there is Map, Street View and Other Properties in the Area. Always a handy feature if the property in question is not suitable.

We hope this makes life easier for you and you find our new design easier on the eye!

As always, we welcome all feedback!

We are always on the look out for good talent to join the Distilled Media development team to work on the next generation of Boards, The Journal, BoardsDeals, Daft and Adverts products and services.

We have a number of job opportunities open from graduate to senior level positions.

Ask yourself the following questions?

- Do you want to code for the busiest websites in Ireland?
- Ask the person beside you if they've used boards.ie, thejournal.ie, daft.ie, adverts.ie or boardsdeals.ie?
- Would you like to work with the latest set of technologies in Ireland's fastest growing technology company?
- Are you a believer in big ideas and looking to work at a company that can really make a difference?
- Does it excite you that your code is used by 100,000's of people within seconds of being deployed?
- Want to work in a modern office in the centre of Dublin using the best of tools?
- Do you find yourself playing with web APIs and building web apps in your spare time?
- Do you like developing to screen sizes of 480x320, want to build iOS apps or Android apps?

We have a very high standard on our engineering team and are looking for smart, passionate developers. The role is an extremely rewarding one for the right candidate!

So who are we?

The Distilled Media Group is Ireland's largest indigenous online publisher, delivering over 4 million unique users and 250 million page impressions per month.

We operate some of Ireland's most popular internet brands including Daft.ie, Ireland's largest property website, Boards.ie, Ireland's largest online community and Adverts.ie a local classifieds marketplace for new and used items. The latest addition to the group is TheJournal.ie, an online news publication where we invite our users to read, share and shape the daily news agenda.

We were recognised as the fastest growing technology and media company in Ireland at the 2009 Deloitte Fast 50 Awards, and also ranked as the 8th in the Fast 500 Europe, Middle East and Africa.

The Distilled Media Group has 20 software developers spread across four companies, Daft.ie (@daftmedia), TheJournal (@thejournal_ie), Board.ie (@boards_ie) and Adverts.ie (@adverts_ie).

A number of our developers regularly attend Pub Standards Dublin, if you've been then you may have already talked to one of us!

What do we do?

A common question that we often receive is what type of projects would I be working on? So, here's a sample of some of the projects that are currently ongoing at Distilled Media:

Adverts.ie

The brand new version of Adverts, launched 4 months ago, runs entirely on the Amazons EC2 platform. Multiple PHP/Nginx webnodes in autoscale mode sitting in front of an array of MySQL & Solr data servers. We are making heavy use of Solr’s excellent built-in faceted search to speed up the site and improve usability. The touch version is fully optimised for all touchscreen phones. In addition to that, native apps for both android and iphone are about to be released.

Boards.ie

Boards recently launched a new search system. It's based on a sharded Solr installation running on EC2 and new data is streamed into it via SNS and SQS. To support search we've implemented a basic API for Boards.ie. We are in the process of expanding this API to support work on mobile applications for Boards and for future development of the site.

BoardsDeals.ie

Boards recently developed and launched a group buying website for its members, boardsdeals.ie. The site is running out in the Amazon EC2 cloud. The system basically works by offering deals at a large discount. Once the minimum number of deals has been purchased the deal is activated. PDF vouchers are automatically generated using FPDF and are mailed out once the timer has run out.

Daft.ie

The past 12 months have seen a meteoric rise in the number of mobile devices being used to access Daft. In order to offer the best user experience possible on these devices, Daft is now accessible via a smartphone-optimised interface as well as dedicated apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android devices. These apps have all been developed in house and are powered exclusively by the Daft API. As the number of mobile devices in the Irish market continues to grow, this is an area on which we'll be continuing to focus in the coming months.

Daft are also in the process of moving our internal statistics system from MySQL over to MongoDB. The system allows advertisers to view detailed reports on the activity of their property. MongoDB is fantastic for logging this type of data due to it’s fast insert and update speeds.

The whole NoSQL movement is a very exciting and fast moving space at the moment, and as we move on it’s going to feature in more and more of our projects.

TheJournal.ie

Since entering public beta last year, TheJournal.ie has established itself as one of Ireland's most popular sources of news online.
This is another of our sites which is run exclusively on the EC2 platform. In addition to releasing a series of popular iPhone, iPad and Android apps, TheJournal has also pioneered some innovations in Irish news coverage. During the recent Irish General Election, the Twitter Tracker tool was one of the most popular elements of the site, allowing analysis of both the popularity of and sentiment towards Irish political leaders running for election.

What now?

Well, if you've read all the way down to here... please send me a cover note & CV to jobs@daft.ie!

We also run a Software Engineer Internship program for Computer Science/Engineering students.

Thanks,
Ciarán
@ciaranmaher

Over the last 18 months or so we've seen colossal growth in traffic coming from smartphones, primarily iPhone and Android devices. Following on from our previous iPhone and iPad app launches, we're delighted to be the first Irish property portal to launch a dedicated Android app.

One of our main aims when working with mobile devices is to ensure as consistent an experience as possible for users across different devices. As such, the app should feel very familiar if you've used our iPhone App or touch-optimised version of Daft.

With this app you can:
- Browse our entire database of properties (sales, lettings, sharing, holiday homes and commercial).
- Browse photos
- Email and call advertisers directly from the app
- View location of property on a map
- Get directions to a property
- View nearby properties
- Refine searches based on price, number of bedrooms and location
- Save your favourite searches and properties to browse through at a later date.

New features

We've also added a couple of new features with this release, integrating with other applications on the Android device.

Google Street View

Where Google Street View imagery is available, each property has a "Show Street View" option. Once you've finished checking out the photographs of the inside of the house, this feature allows you to take a look at the property's neighbourhood and surrounding areas!

Google Navigation

Google's free turn-by-turn navigation can take you from your current location right to the door of the property you wish to view. No more fiddling with paper maps or getting caught out by bad directions!

How to get the app

Scan the QR code below using your phone's barcode reader, or take a look at the application in the Android Market.

Please leave your feedback and suggestions on this blog or email us at support@daft.ie, we’d love to hear from you.

Find out more at www.daft.ie/android.

The report found that asking prices for residential property around the country fell by almost 5% in the final quarter of 2010, meaning that the total fall in asking prices during the year was 14%.

By the end of 2010, the national average asking price had fallen by 40% from the peak in 2007 and stood at just below €220,000. The typical time it takes to sell a property remains high but has fallen from 41 weeks to 36 weeks over the course of the year.

One of the more interesting aspects of this report was the huge variance in price drops seen throughout the country. In his commentary, Ronan Lyons argues that we should no longer be talking in terms of a single property market:

I would argue that we know one very valuable thing: the underlying conditions in the property market vary so dramatically around the country that we should no longer be talking of a single national property market. Instead we should look at different regions as very distinct markets. This is important because it means that talk about "the property market" is essentially useless.

Read the rest of Ronan's commentary and the full report at www.daft.ie/report.

Remember, you should ALWAYS meet with the landlord first and view the property before coming to any kind of agreement.

Here are some of the main factors which could indicate that the ad is a scam:

• The rent appears to be far below the average price range when compared to other properties of a similar size and standard and given the location.
• Usually, if it’s a scam, they never include a photo of the exterior, only hotel-like images of the inside.  Alternatively, they may not include any photos, but in the description they will ask you to email them for photos.
• No phone number is given or if it is, it’s for outside Ireland and most likely will not work.
• Any legitimate ads on the site will never include the email address in the description. If an email address is given in the description, then it’s a scam.

If it’s a scammer, they are likely to tell you that they are not in the country and cannot meet with you in person to show you the property. They will ask you to transfer the deposit to them via Western Union or Moneybookers and they can then post you the keys. NEVER accept or transfer funds via Western Union, Moneybookers or other Electronic Fund Transfer services.

If you do come across any ads which you think may be suspicious, you can use the ‘report ad’ facility to notify us or you can forward details for the ad to support@daft.ie  and we can then investigate.

For more information, please go to the Safety Online page on our site:

http://www.daft.ie/content/safetyonline.daft

To use the map search, simply enter your search criteria as you usually would; then, when the search results are displayed, you should see a new 'Map Search' tab alongside the existing 'List View' and 'Photo Gallery' tabs. Clicking on this will load up a new page displaying a map centred around your chosen area(s). If you drag the map around, new properties are loaded automatically. Properties close together are clustered into one icon, to reduce clutter. Clicking on each purple 'house' icon will display a small information window with a summary of the property and a link to that property's page. Clicking on each 'cluster' icon will cause the map to zoom in on the cluster of properties.

Additionally, where available, you can see Google's Streetview for each property by click on the 'Street View' link in the information window. Clicking on this link will replace the map with Google Streetview for that property. You can return to the map by clicking the red 'X' in the top right on the image.

We hope that this new facility will help users find property in their desired location more easily. It saves needing to know the exact area names you require and can show you properties in areas you never knew about! So, if you don't know your Baldoyle from your Blanchardstown, searching for property has never been easier. Why not give it a go by trying a rental search in Dublin City Centre.

Now for the technical details! We opted for Google Maps Javascript API version 3 to display the map and information windows. The properties are stored in a Solr database with LocalLucene installed, which enables location specific searches. Whenever a map is displayed or moved, an AJAX call is made to the database, requesting all properties within the current bounding box of the map. New properties are then added to the map. We used Google's MarkerClusterer plug-in for the clustering.

As with all of our new feature launches, we’re keen to hear what you think about it, so let us know in the comments box below or via an email to support@daft.ie!