Two agents have spoken of their disquiet at being listed on a website without their knowledge or permission.
One agent, in the north, said she was horrified to find that her company logo and professional photography of properties were on GetAgent.
She also said the information given was inaccurate.
GetAgent is a comparison portal which presents postcode “league tables” of agents.
It shows how many properties they have listed in the last six months, how many they currently have available, average selling times and compares asking prices with prices achieved.
Properties available are displayed with a small clickable logo which takes you through to Rightmove, Zoopla or OnTheMarket.
But the agent said the information about how many properties she had had on her books both now and in previous months was wrong, with a number of homes being marketed very discreetly.
She was also angry because the information makes it look as though her agency is under-performing when in fact it is her deliberate policy only to work with a small number of clients at any time.
She said: “I rang them up and demanded to be taken down from the site, but all they have done is remove my logo.
“I do think that, as an agent, you have a right to choose where to be listed online.”
In London, a second agent – who actually tops his local leader board on GetAgent – said: “The site is using my logo and pictures for which I have paid without either my knowledge or consent.
“The information is also inaccurate. It says I have currently got four properties available, but that is completely wrong – and wrong information can be very damaging.
“I am also very concerned that, as an OnTheMarket agent, I could be breaking the one other portal rule.”
“I am not at all happy about this.”
Colby Short, CEO of GetAgent, said: “With 17,500 estate agents in the UK, as a new company we neither had the manpower nor the traction to call all of them.
“The nature of our site means that we can’t have an opt-in or opt-out option.
“As far as accuracy goes, we make it clear that we take our information from portals.
“Regarding pictures, we only take the thumbnail and we are not reproducing listings – we are not a property portal.
“We took legal advice before we started and we are here to serve home owners in a very positive way.”
Short said that over 600 branches have now signed up to work with the site, which makes its money by charging agents 0.25% when they sell a property for a vendor delivered to them by GetAgent.
This is how EYE covered the story before
What happened to the previous founder of GetAgent?
And what’s the point of rating an agency branch when staff turnover is so high? By the time a deal is done a branch could have an entirely new team meaning a review is worthless.
And how does any rating site which agents pay to be on ever hope to be impartial?
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I’m sorry Colby but saying ‘as a new company we neither had the manpower nor the traction to call all of them’ is a lame excuse – I’d get a different lawyer!
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A lot of web sites are doing this….if they a “scraping your data”…….without consent you are not breaking the other portal rule. You have not signed any contract with them so they cannot hold you liable for fees/costs
What’s the problem free advertising of your company across a broader spectrum of portals giving you wider exposure.
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The problem is a website using your hard earned data / properties and looking to raise revenue off you by selling you an instruction.
These properties will be coming to the market anyway but now you need to give away 0.25% of the fee.
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So for my home postcode it lists the number of properties the agents have taken on in the last 6 months.
Two of the top three have taken on just one or two properties in my area but lots elsewhere.
The third one sells the majority – I live in a village and this is the only agent in the village (thank you Matt Lucas!)
Unless they can make the data more relevant to me and my home then they are useless.
So far I would rate them 2 out of 10 – because I like new and shiny websites.
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Oh and you can absolutely forget 0.25%.
We struggle to get people to pay 1% here because the competition is so fierce.
I’m not going to give away 1/4 of that because a website sent the details of the same owner to 3 or 4 local agents and I won the day.
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