Countrywide agent ticked off by advertising watchdog

A leaflet sent out by Abbotts, a Countrywide agent in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, has been banned by the advertising watchdog after a complaint from rival agents Spicerhaart.

The leaflet was headlined “As the number 1 local agent ... we sell a house every 2 minutes.* It is worth thinking about!” Text in a box at the bottom of the page stated “Abbotts Countrywide”. 

The reverse of the leaflet was headlined: “You will be Sold on our approach to selling your home” and had a list of branches and phone numbers. Text to the right of the page stated “Abbotts are your ... number 1 local agent”. Text at the bottom stated “*Figures based on Countrywide 2009 gross sales”.

Spicerhaart, which has itself been reported several times to the ASA, challenged the claims.

Abbotts said the claim “we sell a house every 2 minutes*” was based on the number of gross sales arranged by the whole of  Countrywide in 2009. They pointed out that the claim was accompanied by an asterisk which linked to text on the back of the leaflet that made clear that it related to Countrywide data.

They said the actual calculation revealed that Countrywide sold a house every 106 seconds.

However, the ASA rejected the argument, and said that readers of the leaflet would take it mean that Abbotts were the number one local agent, selling more properties locally than any others.

The ASA also noted that Countrywide produced evidence to show it had won Best Large Chain at the 2010 ESTAs. However, the ASA said those awards were made on the basis of voting by customers and not upon objective data about market share or sales.

“Notwithstanding that,” said the ASA, “we also noted that the award had been made to the Countrywide as a national operator and not to Abbotts as a local agent. We also noted that the ad provided by Abbotts referred to various other awards given to Countrywide nationally, but we did not consider that an ad was sufficient substantiation to support the number one claim.

“Because we had not seen robust comparative evidence that Abbotts held a larger market share or sold more properties than other local agents, we concluded that the claim “the number 1 local agent” was misleading.”