A student property listing on Rightmove and Zoopla that offered reduced rent for female students in return for “special favours” was swiftly removed yesterday morning by the portals.
But that wasn’t before the listing was screengrabbed by shocked Rightmove users and was cached by Google.
The controversial listing, for a two-bedroom property in Birmingham, was uploaded through StudentTenant.com.
The agency website gives landlords an option to upload their own listing for free that then automatically appears on portals.
Excuse me @rightmove how can you sanction and post this on your website with such confidence?! pic.twitter.com/b1u0MydOsQ
— Lindsay Denton (@LolaxWolf) July 26, 2018
It said: “Two bedroom property available to female student close to Longbridge station which is 20 minutes to Selly Oak station property is available on a reduced rent for special favours to be discussed.”
Rightmove said the listing breached its rules and was removed as soon as it was made aware.
The portal said in a statement: “As soon as we became aware of the text in this property listing we immediately removed it from Rightmove.
“We’ve spoken with the agent advertising the property who have confirmed that they’re carrying out a full investigation, and we’re carrying out a full review of this agent as this is in breach of Rightmove’s terms.”
A Zoopla spokesman also confirmed the listing had been removed for breaching its rules.
This wasn’t enough for some Twitter users who questioned why the portals can’t spot these listings earlier.
Honestly don’t understand why you don’t have an algorithm to flag these kinds of ads.
— Kat Molesworth (@thatkat) July 26, 2018
StudentTenant.com said in a statement that the landlord was now banned from posting listings.
It said: “It has been brought to our attention that a property has been uploaded by a private landlord to our platform with the view to exploit students. This is something that we would categorically never condone, and we are deeply saddened to see this type of offering on our platform.
“We have measures in place to ensure that no contact details are ever passed to a landlord without our prior communication with both parties, so students are protected before any property viewing goes ahead.
“As the largest online student letting agent, we have tenant safety as our top priority.
“We will be carrying out a detailed internal review to further improve our processes as well.
“We have reported this to the relevant authorities and are working to ensure this never happens again.”
A damning indictment of this firm’s internal processes (or lack thereof)… has StudentTenant.com no vetting/authorisation processes in place PRIOR to a listing going ‘live’ on their platform?
If you ever want justification to use a ‘full-service’ agent, this is it…
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This is why Rightmove should only let agents advertise on their platform.
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A guy I worked with uploaded a property for sale, without checking his photos properly. He had decided it was a good plan to not only take a picture of a big hand-painted sign in the property insulting a former prime minister, but then loaded it on to our computer system against the property, which got uploaded to RM, Z etc (before OTM arrived)
Even Agents can be caught out by mistakes, although this particular species of scum made his proposition deliberately…
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By way of a guess, was the seller was a Mr. G. Brown of 11 Downing Street, SW1A (circa 2007)?
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Lol, no but he was the person mentioned in the sign!
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Only missed by one door!…Not a bad guess 😉
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