The major portals are investigating an advertising service which is allowing home owners and landlords to list their properties on Rightmove and Zoopla.
It charges £237 for a sales property to be listed for up to six months, and £27 for a lettings property.
LetsAdvertise emphasises that its service “is exclusive to home owners and landlords and is not available to estate agents and letting agents”.
LetsAdvertise does offer other services beyond listing, such as EPCs, floorplans and photography. It does not seem to offer sales boards, and it says: “LetsAdvertise do not negotiate on your behalf. We will pass on any offers we receive for your property but it is up to you to negotiate with potential buyers.”
LetsAdvertise is owned by Swindon Homes Direct and NetRent.
Swindon Homes Direct describes itself as an innovative estate and lettings agent operating on a ‘no sale, no fee’ basis.
NetRent offers a variety of services to landlords, including tenant referencing and insurance.
A Zoopla spokesperson thanked EYE for bringing this to to their attention, and said: “We are aware of this and our compliance team are dealing with this issue to ensure that this agent is removed from our site if they do not meet our criteria.”
Rightmove also said the advertiser is under investigation.
http://www.letsadvertise.co.uk/
Comments (16)
………and we remain Sleeping with the Online Enemy?
one wonders at what point we simply hand the self serving portals our office keys?…… of course, we have already handed them the virtual keys!
Quote: LetsAdvertise does offer other services beyond listing, such as EPCs, floorplans and photography. It does not seem to offer sales boards, and it says: “LetsAdvertise do not negotiate on your behalf. We will pass on any offers we receive for your property but it is up to you to negotiate with potential buyers.”
As such this is NOT a passive intermediate model and should vendors give incorrect info that gets advertised it is upto LetsAdvertise to check in respect of CPRs and BPRs
How will the budget models like Purple, easyP, emove, Tepilo compete when sellers can save £hundreds 🙂
How long till we see the £49-£99 models
For sure unrepresented sellers are being encourage to save a little and lose a lot due to underselling and the increase of professional Buyer Rep agents just waiting to screw the pants off vulnerable sellers. Love it.
Vendors should then use OTM agents.
OTM does not have the reach of RM/Z. What would be better would be if OTM lost its one other rule and opened agents being able to reach all buyers vi all portals and all other outlets.
Whats interesting is the recent WHICH report showing only 43% of buyers come from main portals.
As I see apart from boards (supposedly representing) 11% of buyers pull. Budget agents and FSBO listers are missing around 1/2 the market.
OTM isn’t a bad looking portal. Whats wrong is its restraints.
At last you agree with something I said ……. in the main the public don’t use web portals, they use the High Street which is where all the kin of web only business’s mislead the public that they do the same job….. no high street presence = not the same.
I agree on the whole with that WT.
All said I have some online only agents who get fees up and sub to several associate INEA agents who have 5-6 Hg St windows.
Not all online only agents are bad. But dont like false budget agency.
Thin end of the wedge comes to mind. We have been warned many times before and are now seeing the first move towards a tipping point….
But in a further statement both Zoopla and Rghtmove added “although we will investigate, we will both take our time about it as the concept is something both of us have considered, and are interested to know what take up and reaction there may be to private sellers advertising on our respective portals…………”
So they charge you a fee to throw your property on a few portals but beyond that do naff all else, sounds rather familiar to me.
Don’t knock it, being honest about being a passive intermediary is far more preferable to firms passing off their offering as full service estate agency and when it all goes horribly wrong £800 and 10 months later they claim vendors were paying for a passive intermediary listing not expert advice and a sale.
About TWENTY FIVE MILLION POUNDS, £25,000,000 every year is being handed over to firms that promise to SAVE thousands yet deliver only failure and disappointment. It is about time the redress schemes were very clear about the differences in service.
There is pay to list passive intermediary services like this one; vendors get a listing and that’s it, clean, honest and cheap.
Estate agency; principals pay for informed advice. Case law precedents say if the advice is negligent , wrong or bad, the agent forfeits their claim to a fee. Trying to pass one service off as another is a misrepresentation and should be stopped.
Looking up valuations on flawed algorithm valuation systems does not constitute expert advice so it becomes very easy to prove negligence.
Well said Mr May. Roll on Buyer Rep Agents to start saving Buyers £housands from cheap listers who don’t offer negotiation services
Hang on a minute Trev I thought you were all for open market, banning restrictive clauses, cartels, freedom of business, best for consumer etc!
@Woodentop. I am and I hate budget operative models that hide the fact that they offer a no frills service where the consumer is worse off.
I see that good agents fed up with silly low fees for not a lot will change from game keeper to poacher.
The sad thing will be vulnerable sellers will get burnt. But we can’tstop the changing market.
As more budget operatives open from £99 – £199 or less (and close) it will strain other £499 – £999 budgets.
I see the end winners will be agents charging more for more service (once Joe Seller wises up, that pay peanuts and you get monkeys) and the consumer sellers wise enough to see that for 1% to 2% they can achieve maybe 2%-10% higher margins in some cases on sstc.
Interesting US article about FSBO costing seller more than using a traditional broker agent: http://www.chicagonow.com/getting-real/2014/09/for-sale-by-owner-the-myths-and-lies-about-selling-your-own-home/
Splendid, ground breaking stuff,
The press release doesn’t say ‘disrupt’ and is missing a couple of other snippets of guff but God bless them for ’emphasising’ this marvel is NOT avaliable to estate agents, a disappointment for the estate agent world that we are being deprived of this clever lad’s creation.
Jonnie
‘Disruption’ has become a cliché synonym of broken promises and failure.
As i presume “Lets Advertise” are paying Rightmove and Zoopla a monthly subscription, you would have thought they would have taken an interest in what sort of business they were before allowing them to list any properties. I know it is difficult to monitor every listing, but this is still a really poor show from R and Z.
But after letting the call centre “agents” on there, do R & Z even care who is advertising as long as they are paying their monthly fee.