An agent has said his business is getting up to 100 false leads a day from Rightmove.
Luke Bennett, director of SW19 which has three branches in south-west London, said: “We have approached Rightmove and they have confirmed that someone is targeting their website and that they cannot find a solution.”
Rightmove yesterday evening confirmed a spam problem, although it said that this was confined only to a few agents.
Bennett said that the problem has been going on for about a week and is proving “an aggravation” in terms of wasted staff time.
In an email from Rightmove, the firm was told: “We’re aware you’ve been sent some leads that are not genuine.
“We’ve been investigating this problem due to repeated abuse of the Rightmove lead form.”
Bennett said that on one day his firm received 100 false viewing requests, and that yesterday there were about 30. He said it has been impossible to detect the false leads from the genuine ones until they are followed up.
The leads that Bennett’s firm is experiencing are viewing requests for both sales and rental properties, and all have false names and telephone numbers, he told EYE.
Bennett, whose firm uses Zoopla’s Expert Agent software which is automatically reporting on the number of leads, said: “We cannot possibly be the only firm to be struggling with this.”
Yesterday evening, a spokesperson for Rightmove said: “A small number of agents have received some email leads through the Rightmove website recently which we’ve identified to be spam.
“We know this is irritating and we’ve been working closely with these agents to separate the leads from genuine home hunter leads and remove them from their reports.
“We’ve introduced short-term changes to help this and are also working hard to augment our existing measures to prevent these leads being sent.”
Last night, Bennett said that fake leads are still continuing to come through.
Comments (12)
False leads!! I don’t get any Leads.. OTM!!! make the move the RMEXIT..31st October
Funny how they’ve not been able to control this problem affecting agents but they have time to take off our telephone numbers and other parts of an ad they don’t like. As ever it’s all about them……
We have been getting these for weeks now and they dont seem to be able to do anything about it! Have offered us a very poor “work-around” without any suggestion of a long term solution. Perhaps they need someone techy to sort it..oh hang on, they are meant to be at the forefront of proptech arent they?
what’s the workaround?
False Leads, from Rightmove? ….really? Who would have thought?
Jessica Fletcher from Rightmove is investigating. Get yourself a cuppa, a couple of rich tea biscuits & settle down.
Is Rightmove not still 2 folk running a business from their garage somewhere?
Funny how it’s now being called spam, when that’s what we got day in, day out until we left!
The real question is what other portal is driving this. Zoopla is too big, so has to be one of the other ones…
Or..
Rightmove’s leads are finally revealed for the value they offer
“An agent has said his business is getting up to 100 false leads a day from Rightmove”…
So…Business as usual for Rightmove…
To borrow a quote: “Something smells fishy, and I’m not talking about the contents of Baldrick’s apple crumble…”
Because rightmove is no authority and knows nothing about the business of agency, how to bring down a PLC? hire a botnet for a couple of grand and carpet bomb uk agents with false leads for a month and everybody gives up on this ” website “, rightmove wouldn’t know how to get somebody moved if they painted themselves purple danced naked on top of a harpsichord singing moving days are here again.
…”a month…”?
I suspect this has been going on for far longer than a month…
Perhaps this is just a case of the RM lead generating computer “playing up” and inadvertently sending random leads to one agent, instead of the 10 they were intended to be divided between? Who knows…?
Going on for about a week?
I’ve had the issue of rubbish leads from portals that materialise to nothing for years now.
I’ve had some 1* reviews from a couple of those!