I’m in Milan and used Daft while searching for student housing around Dubai. The search coverage and general accessibility were useful, but duplicate listings, stale availability and inconsistent floor-area entries made comparisons harder than expected. I often couldn’t tell how recently a listing had been confirmed or what the next transaction step would be after contacting the advertiser. Would you keep using it as the main search tool, or only for initial discovery? I’m particularly interested in mobile filters, map-pin accuracy, saved-search alerts and what happened after you contacted an advertiser.
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Using Daft from Milan to search for student housing in Dubai
- Thread starter AdaHope
- Start date
Using Daft as the main source risks relying on stale availability, while abandoning it after the first search would lose the useful coverage. A workable middle ground is to use it to find possibilities, then verify each one directly before treating it as available.
I’d group likely duplicates by photographs, price, map position and wording rather than trusting different reference numbers. If the advertiser confirms the room and explains what the floor-area figure covers, keep it on the shortlist; if availability or area remains vague, move on. When you contacted advertisers, were old entries still shown as live, or had they simply not been removed?
I’d group likely duplicates by photographs, price, map position and wording rather than trusting different reference numbers. If the advertiser confirms the room and explains what the floor-area figure covers, keep it on the shortlist; if availability or area remains vague, move on. When you contacted advertisers, were old entries still shown as live, or had they simply not been removed?
The floor-area problem may also be a definition problem rather than just bad data. One advert might show the private room, another the whole unit, and another may leave the basis unclear. For student housing, I’d compare room type, private versus shared facilities and location first, then ask the advertiser to define exactly what the stated area covers.
I wouldn’t put all of the freshness issue on the portal. Advertisers may fail to update or remove listings, particularly when one property is promoted through several entries. That said, the interface still needs to make the listing date and latest confirmation easy to understand. Without that, users cannot distinguish a slow advertiser from an old advert.
Map pins deserve more weight than they sometimes get. A pin placed only at neighbourhood level can make a student room look practical when the actual address is much less convenient. I’d ask for the approximate street or nearest transport point before spending time on detailed questions. Also save screenshots of the price, area and description so changes between first contact and later messages are visible.
Price history or links to completed records could help with context, but they would not solve the immediate student-housing problem: whether this specific room is genuinely available on the required dates and on the stated terms. I’d prioritise a visible last-confirmed date and better duplicate control over historical information. Were the mobile filters retained when you returned to the results, or did you have to rebuild the search?
A practical workflow would be: keep a short list outside the portal, record each listing’s contact date, note suspected duplicates, and ask every advertiser the same questions about availability, total price, floor-area meaning and exact location. Saved-search alerts are only useful if fresh and repeated listings can be separated. Until that is clear, alerts may increase noise rather than save time.