A Tory MP is hoping that ‘portal juggling’ will be the subject of a debate at Westminster.
Derek Thomas, MP for St Ives in Cornwall, has submitted an application for a Westminster Hall debate on portal juggling for the week starting June 13.
Cornish agent Chris Wood has been briefing the MP on the practice of so-called portal juggling.
Meanwhile, TV property expert Henry Pryor has warned that buyers may be being misled by certain agents – “Some certainly seem to be as slippery oiled eels and the big property portals aren’t helping,” he says.
He cites one property which appears to have been put on the market at the end of April but in fact has been with the agent for over 100 days.
Pryor notes: “Each time a property is re-listed, it is re-matched and alerts are sent to the millions of accounts that users have set up. This is a cunning way of getting a property back out in front of buyers. Of course this won’t be the case here but it does show why potential buyers need to be sceptical of listing dates given by agents and the history shown by the portals.
“Rightmove needs to get a grip of this and Zoopla seem to be no better at policing it but at least they are trying to help buyers unlike spineless OnTheMarket which doesn’t include a listing date, preferring I suspect to instead cover up their member agents’ embarrassments.
“Caveat emptor or buyer beware! Estate agents are engaged in what is being termed portal juggling. It’s wrong, it needs to be stopped and those involved need to be shown up for the con that it is.”
Those of us that don’t portal juggle would seem to be left at a significant disadvantage. I really don’t see why the portals list properties in the default order of “most recent”. Surely most home searchers are more interested in cost…. So default should be “lowest price”.
Listing in order of “lowest price” might also encourage landlords to price more competitively…. which in turn could help to keep the very high cost of renting in check….
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Hahaha.
I assume you have only just entered the world of agency MF, or have way too much faith in everyone. If the websites ordered things by default lowest-priced first, all you’d see are a load of fake adverts, with each agent trying to get their property to the top of the list.
They’d receive a call from an applicant and be told ‘sorry, that property has just gone, but I do have lots of others you may be interested in…’
Default of Most-recent makes sense to me, although more so for rentals, whereby an applicant will set a criteria (budget and so on) and then take a look at the sites throughout the day to see what is new and map pick their interest.
And with regards to juggling and so on, I was once told by a trading standards officer that as there was no dedicated portal legislation, they could instead use the Town & Country planning regs as guidance – ie those applied to signs. So, you can only list a property that is for sale or to rent, you can list it once, you cannot keep re-adding it, you should take the listing down in a timely manner once sold/let and so on.
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Simply make it an ‘Undesirable Practice’ under the 1991 legislation. Job done.
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I don’t see why it needs to be the subject of a debate when there are already sufficient legislation in place to deal with these issues. Someone needs to wake up the regulators.
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Misrepresentation act? sales of goods act? or a whole new act all together…”The Misrepresentation of services act 2016″ our services our are goods…we would rarely see a goods item in a shop misrepresenting what it can do.. “it does what it says on the tin”…well, when we have a stock item which doesn’t do what it says on the tin the item is discontinued…now i’m not saying we should discontinue agents who consistently misrepresent their services to clients..But there needs to be some sort of deterrent…
EPC fines are £200 per offence? Should there be some form of fine imposed by the portals to the repeat offenders or better yet the juggle police? – Don’t laugh, the juggle police have fearful powers..24 hours warning before a fine is imposed per offence, the power to remove an agent’s office from advertising for a fixed duration of time? Not only would that bring out the true estate agents out there, but diminish the ones which reply on website leads to generate any sales.
Website portals have a new job availability – Juggle police officer, agent portal statistics are less likely to be manipulated, less clients are mislead by misrepresented data, good honest estate agents shine through!
-Honest work for honest pay
Z
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