Zoopla was last night reviewing whether an online agent listing with it meets its membership criteria after offering some of its services for free.
MoveSelf, which launched in 2017, lets home owners create their own property listing for sale or rent for free and they can then pay for extra services such as a For Sale board for £20, photography or floor plans for £75 each and sales progression for £250 on a ‘no sale no fee’ basis.
It is a member of The Property Ombudsman.
Depending on the package, this meant a vendor could sell their home for from nothing to £560.
This makes it cheaper than Purplebricks’ charge of £899 and £1,999 for Yopa’s ‘no sale no fee’ offering.
Regardless of the services used, MoveSelf also said listings would appear on Zoopla, as well as other property websites such as The House Shop and Mouse Price.
It does not provide listings on Rightmove.
Providing a Zoopla listing would appear to risk going against the portal’s rules that restrict listings directly from owners, but MoveSelf describes itself as an agent as it reviews all listings, does know-your-customer checks and verifies properties against Land Registry records.
It currently has no listings.
Zoopla said in a statement, when asked by EYE, that it has not changed its policy on direct listings.
It said: “When MoveSelf commenced listing with us we assessed them against our criteria to confirm they provided a bespoke estate agency service, which they did.
“They don’t currently have any live listings on Zoopla and we will reassess whether they still meet our criteria as details of how they operate appear to have changed.”
Surely a vendor cannot write their own property description, this must be checked by the agent during a visit if done so.
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I am sure many of these call centre type companies have vendors write their own details. What authority s their to monitor this? Something would have to be horrifically wrong for a buyer to complain and who is then punished?
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They can get around it by labelling it ‘vendor’s comments’ or ‘vendor’s description’, thus relieving themselves of any responsibility. Obviously not ethical, I’m not actually sure if it 100% legal either but I’ve seen it done a quite a few times.
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You cant have a membership that offers “Private Sales”, regardless if you might do some full service. Relying on the poacher to be honest … you are having a laugh.
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Really happy Zoopla are actually setting some standards. I used Doorstep last year (I know I was stupid and went for cheap over quality) I am an ex agent and was looking to just get on Rightmove and Zoopla. They didn’t do a thing, no valuation, no visit, no help and they even just forwarded the emails sent with the enquiry! The email enquiries made me laugh, they were in the format of the portals saying, do not pass on to third parties with the ZPG header and Rightmove, they didn’t even bother to change them (man clicking forward) 🙂 I didn’t get much interest and when I tested the enquiry line no one picked it up. SO a total waste of £99 but I did complain to the portals as there is no way they are ticking the boxes on the ‘estate agent’ front. They clearly shouldn’t be on either portals or the property ombudsmen and should no way be described as an estate agent. It’s these guys that are killing the online model and hurting traditional estate agent model. The portals should protect the industry from this and the £99 players in the market there is a reason why they are so dirt cheap and it’s because they don’t do a thing.
I ended up going local for my sale and it worked for me, less headache. I am all for change but and variation assisted by tech but there should be standard that everyone follows.
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