Agent's leaflet rapped by Advertising Standards Authority

A leaflet sent out by an estate agent giving the number of monthly visits to Rightmove has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority.

The ASA said the agent was quoting out-of-date figures, and, puzzlingly, said it also had no evidence that the Rightmove figures had been independently audited.

The agent, R House, at 25 Fore Street, Torpoint, Devon, had been reported to the ASA by a competitor estate agent, Richard Dolton, of 67 Fore Street, Torpoint.

The leaflet was sent out last October and stated “28 million visits every month”.

Small print stated "Source: Average Rightmove Statistics [Aug-Oct 2007]".

Text on the other side of the leaflet said: “We have noticed you are currently marketing your property with Richard Dolton and therefore feel it prudent to ask you the following questions: Question One: What is the UK's number one property website, receiving 28 million visits every month? Answer: rightmove.co.uk. Question Two: Is your property currently benefiting from the UK's biggest property shop window by featuring on rightmove.co.uk? Answer: No. We will guarantee that you will receive the above benefits. We can make 10 times more buyers see your property via a showcase or premium display on rightmove.co.uk."
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Richard Dolton challenged on two grounds, whether:

1. the claim "28 million visits every month"  to Rightmove was accurate, because he believed it was based on old figures;

2. the claim that ten times more buyers would view properties with Rightmove than with his business could be substantiated.

R House said all the figures in the leaflet were sourced from marketing material supplied by Rightmove. They said, as clients of Rightmove, they had assumed the figures supplied were accurate. They said they had distributed very few of these particular leaflets.

Rightmove said the front cover of the leaflet in question was designed and distributed to R House Estate Agents in December 2007 and they believed their statistics were accurate at the time. They said they had not given permission and approval for the 2008 leaflet, which had been put together, printed and distributed by R House without their knowledge.

Both complaints were upheld.

On the first, the ASA said the Rightmove figures quoted by R House were for the previous year and that R House had not shown the data was accurate at the time the leaflet was distributed. It considered that the claim was therefore likely to mislead.

On the second complaint, the ASA said it had not received confirmation that the figures R House referred to had been independently audited.

The ASA said: “We considered that, without evidence to show that the website traffic claims had been independently audited and adhered to industry agreed standards, it was impossible to confirm that the figures did not include double counting or invalid traffic due to spiders, robots or internal usage. We understood that figures for website traffic could be independently audited to standards defined by the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards.”

It went on: “Because we had not seen such confirmation that a property displayed in a "showcase" box on Rightmove's website was likely to be seen by ten times more buyers than a standard listing, we concluded R House had not substantiated the claim.”

Rightmove’s figures are, however, independently audited. This May, Rightmove said it is receiving 40m visits a month according to Hitwise.

However, it is is known that between August 2007 and August 2008, according to another independent measure, Comscore, traffic to Rightmove slipped by 29.5% as the property market crashed.