The UK’s second biggest property sales portal - Zoopla, has today announced its decision to crack down firmly on property listings that aren’t from ‘bona-fide estate or letting agents, offering a full range of agency services’.
This news comes as no shock to most property professionals; as the surge in ‘quick online estate agents’ continues to boom in the industry. It is expected that Rightmove will make a similar adjustment to their already strict guidelines for estate agents very soon.
The new guidelines for Zoopla will be as follows, and any firm advertising on Zoopla must:-
- operate as an estate or letting agent, not a pure aggregator
- prepare property details on behalf of the vendor or landlord
- handle enquiries directly with no call forwarding to principal
- act as intermediary between the parties during transaction
- not provide a ‘listing only’ service as a back door to portals
Estate agents and cash buyers.
The news from Zoopla is expected to be positive news for genuine cash buying companies, as it is thought it will take away some of the confusion that online estate agents have created in the market place.
Notoriously, quick sale estate agents have advertised in the search engines as ‘cash buyers’, which is something they clearly aren’t and were previously just listing property on the open market using sites like Zoopla. This has created some confusion for vendors who were expecting a genuine quick cash sale, and being roped into signing up to 6 month estate agency contracts.
David Sessford of cash buying company Best Prices Paid had this to say:-
“Without access to the big property portal websites, the place for cheap online estate agents is diminishing. Recently we have noticed a huge increase of scam companies pretending to be cash buyers in our industry, but turning out to be shady estate agents. Hopefully vendors will realise that without access to the large portals, the chance of anyone finding a buyer on the open market is near impossible.”
The Zoopla group are also said to be taking action against estate agents who do not conform to their terms and conditions in regards to keeping the status of listings updated within a reasonable timescale. An independent study found that the biggest complaint from Zoopla users was that properties were not being taken down from the site quickly enough after they have been sold.
Company Name: BestPricesPaid
Contact Person: David Sessford
Email:Send Email
Phone: 08006127917
Address:Tedco Works, Henry Robson Way
City: South Shields
State: Tyne And Wear
Country: United Kingdom
Website: http://www.bestpricespaid.co.uk
Source: www.abnewswire.com
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