Two agents with similar business models – Purplebricks and EweMove – were yesterday listing the same property.
EweMove was listing the property as sold subject to contract, while Purplebricks was listing it as newly available.
Yesterday, EweMove reported the matter to Rightmove’s compliance team. Last night, a Rightmove spokesperson said the portal was investigating the matter.
However, Purplebricks insisted there is a sensible explanation, involving the automated relisting of a property if the client wants a marketing break. A spokesperson told us last night that the Purplebricks Local Property Expert and the vendor have now agreed to de-list the property. There had not been any intentional re-listing of a property that, as it turned out, had gone under offer with another agent during the marketing break.
According to Rightmove records, the house in Yeovil went on the market with Purplebricks last June 24.
The £210,00 property went unsold and the vendor instructed EweMove instead on November 5.
It went under offer in January.
However, yesterday Purplebricks relisted it.
The same property therefore yesterday appeared twice on Rightmove – once as sold subject to contract with EweMove, and once as newly on the market and available with Purplebricks.
The matter came to light on social media after a tweet by EYE regular PeeBee.
Glenn Ackroyd, the self-styled head shepherd of EweMove, initiated an immediate investigation – and placed a video of it online.
It features a call between Ackroyd and the EweMove branch manager Paul Gammage, who said the sale is due to complete this week.
Gammage said that the vendor had been unaware that his property had been relisted by Purplebricks.
Ackroyd also expressed concern that the buyer of the property might see it relisted and assume that the sale had fallen through.
Gammage said he would be calling the buyer shortly to reassure him.
A spokesperson for Purplebricks said last night that the vendor had taken a marketing break from Purplebricks.
He said that in such a break, the property would be off Purplebricks for a time agreed by the vendor, and then relisted; or the customer would agree to an automated relisting, wanting the property to be -relisted after a marketing break.
He said: “In this case, the re-listing of was automatic.”
The spokesperson said it was unusual that in this case, the customer had in the interim instructed another agent.
Purplebricks calls its business a hybrid agent. EweMove describes itself as a “mixed hybrid and traditional agency model”.
https://youtu.be/vO4VcdLUF4Y
Comments (30)
It is very possible that the EweMove “sale” was “Rent to Buy” and that the vendor first contracted EweMove to get advice if it was better to rent the property then sell it.
Hi Ringi – It was a straightforward sale.
The vendor contacted Purple Bricks on the 24th June 2015 to list the house. After being unable to sell, we listed it on the 5th November 2015 and EweMove found a buyer in December. It’s due to complete later this week.
Purple Bricks de-listed it on the 15th January 2016, and re-listed it yesterday as for sale. You can verify all the above from the Rightmove+ screenshots shown below the article above.
Why has Eye fallen for PB’s marketing guff and insists on calling these people “Local Property Experts”. For the rep to be local he/she would either need to live in, or work exclusively in the area. To be regarded as an expert, they would need to have worked in the industry for 10,000 hours – about 10 years. I would bet that neither are true with any of PB’s reps.
The regulation of estate agents and estate agency is not just failing, it is broken:
The TPO do not have a full mandate to police agents complaints
The ASA can remove an advert but, offenders know it is just a minor inconvenience and a bad News story that will pass in time.
Zoopla and Rightmove appear incapable or unwilling of taking effective action to the point of complicity
Trading Standards seem completely disinterested/ under-resourced and,
The NAEA/ ARLA etc do not have any disciplinary powers over non-members, of which they are many.
The industry needs an independent and properly funded resource that can deal with complaints by agents of agents. The public and investors are being badly misled and badly served. Brandon Lewis and Savid Javis, take note!
Dirty tricks, misleading advertising, made up statistics, lots of bluff
These online only agents are a blight on the housing industry. Somebody with some teeth needs to clamp down on one of them and make an example of them to others.
Sad to say, it is not just call-centre agents (though they are by far the worst in terms of numbers juggled). Some BIG name high street agents are also breaking the law in this manner too.
I have seen a large corporate (sorry they say they are an independent) offering a deal of just 0.75%*
of course the *simply states Terms & Conditions apply.
When you call the agent they will not tell you the T&C’s they want to send somebody out. (we got a staff member to get a val on their property to see what marketing and what the catch was).
Basically you pay 0.75% if you accept an offer 10% below asking! – So if you have a £300,000 property are you going to accept £269.999?! – If you accept an offer more inline with what people offer say £297,500 you pay the standard 1.5%
To me this is conning the public NOT clever marketing.
So it sold during a marketing break. Thats logical 🙂
And of course no high street agent has ever falsified listings on Rightmove to boost their figures.
I agree with Typhoon this a total non event and the proverbial storm in a teacup.
4 dislikes already 🙂 The hypocrisy is mindboggling. Yesterday Newsboy told of an agent friend of his who was getting his staff to deliberately click on a competitors Google adwords to run their budget down and not one agent on here posted a critical reply. Newsboy even asked how much online agents would lose if this was done to their ads by agents across the country.!
To hurl criticism at Purplebricks for what might be a totally valid reason and at the same time act like little saints on the same subject of relisting and falsifying figures whilst not condemning Newsboys posts? As I said before very hypocritical.
I doubt you are getting the dislikes for accusing agents of hypocrisy. I think you and Typhoon are getting them because you both think this is a non-story. And it isn’t. It’s actually another little piece in a jigsaw puzzle of what some agents/portals are doing to paint a false picture of their alleged size and success.
You are getting dislikes from Agents who are not portal juggling but whom you just tarred with the same 5h1tty brush as the bottom feeders.
I’m not sure if you know what a Ratner moment is but you just alienated the whole of your target audience.
‘Tilly’
You are either NOT an Estate Agent at all – or one who plays the same game as those this article refers to.
Either way your comments over the last couple of days speak volumes for themselves.
Suggest you take a ‘Marketing Break’.
Imagine a PLC telling prospective investors and customers that all of their property experts were qualified, when you knew they were not.
Imagine a number of well-known names of both the call-centre and high street models, who were regularly and systematically giving their customers “marketing breaks” amongst other techniques and, by doing so, were able to deceive buyers, sellers and investors and make claims about selling prices, numbers of new instructions and market share that were quite simply deliberately falsified.
Imagine one or more of the property portals had been given a large (several Gb of data) by a number of agents highlighting the above and other illegal practices but who did little or nothing.
One of those portals IS now looking at this issue and that is to be welcomed. What happens next will be interesting and may have huge implications.
ROLL UP…ROLL UP – for today’s extensive selection of properties just returned from their “Marketing Break”.
Some have seemingly had more than one “Marketing Breaks” in the past year.
A couple seen recently would make even Judith Chalmers envious…
PIE what on earth are you doing giving a petty squabble between agents ( sorry electronic platforms – my mistake) like this such house room. Get back to reporting something with substance please!
Typhoon – don’t look at the minute detail – look at the extremely wide picture.
Mr Ackroyd has done Agency a service by spotlighting this in the most public way possible.
If it was a simple case of an isolated incident, I would concede your point. There is, however, a major back-story to this incident which has been growing for some time. Watch this space.
A petty squabble? This is one property out of a consistent, concerted and seemingly scheduled attempt to game the portals. Last week Rightmove were alerted to the fact that Monday would see at least one agent list and de-list a significant proportion of their register because Monday was the beginning of the new month. Seemingly as soon as the clock struck Monday the juggling began.
This wouldn’t be a non story if it were one of your sales potentially being disrupted by another agent gaming the system, it wouldn’t be a non story if you understood the extent of gaming and it wouldn’t be a non story if you understood the lengths some people have gone to to suppress the story.
Perhaps we should have more stories like the fishy adwords one yesterday!
This is the wild west of property selling. Where is the sheriff, gone fishing?
Boss Hawg? Why he’s at on his veranda watching the subscriptions come rollin in. Wouldn’t do to go upsetting them tha hens now their layin nicely.
What may I ask will Rightmove do to Purplebricks ?. Will it send Purplebricks to the naughty step. I think we all know who wears the trousers in that relationship.
Customer to friend “OF COURSE we still love each other – we’re just taking a marketing break…”
#jackanory
On another note about RM. did you know that there mew Realtime feed has a field which contains the name of the client. IE the seller or the landlord. Nice bit of data capture which probably causes us all to break the data protection act if your software supplier fills it in for you. Wonder what they’re going to use that for??!!
I would advise caution, EAMD – this is something that Robert May first raised many, many moons ago and got a proper beasting over!
Mustn’t be true if people won’t accept it or do anything about it…
Agreed, Robert is years ahead on this. It’s jut lucky RM don’t own a comparison site like uSwitch – Imagine what that data field would be used for then!
If Ros and Nick manage to get through the inevitable balancing act headache of news suppression versus editorial independence this story will have given them perhaps data protection/data theft is a story for another day.
Which even if true, Purplebricks, doesn’t explain why you were advertising a property which was under offer/ sold subject to contract, as ‘available’ in clear breach of CPR regulations.
Because they want to.
Because they can.
They will continue to break the laws and regulations as long as there is no punishment for doing what they are doing.
Forgive my scepticism on the ‘automatic relisting’ explanation.
This doesn’t quite fit with the vendors explanation that the PurpleBricks local agent phoned them up yesterday and asked the vendor to reveal their personal security password for the PurpleBricks customer site to change the property status.
The vendor was apparently told that the listing would be ‘hidden’, when in fact it was re-listed. At the time, it was already hidden (invisible on Rightmove)!
This is completely at odds with laying the fault at an automated system – On the vendor’s account, it followed the deliberate actions of the Purple Bricks agent who instigated the re-listing.