MSE News: Why selling your home could get harder next week

TiVo_Lad

The word cartel springs to mind. Restrictive Practices too. Bets on how long it will be before a complaint goes in to the Competition Commission?

dw1

Gonzo1987 wrote: »

100 branches in wales won't be listed on Rightmove...so there people will turn to OTM and Zoopla.

Reassuring that Zoopla will at least keep some high street agents after this, but the restrictions on only using one other site and banning online-only agents both seem a bit anti-competitive to me. Pots and kettles come to mind.

Then again I can't stand estate agents, online or otherwise, so please forgive me for being cynical

Thrugelmir

TiVo_Lad wrote: »

The word cartel springs to mind. Restrictive Practices too. Bets on how long it will be before a complaint goes in to the Competition Commission?

Why is it a cartel? EA's will advertise each others properties on their own websites.

If anything it should EA's costs. As Rightmove obviously run the service to make money. Whereas the EA's are more likely to operate on a Co-Operative basis.

WestonDave

If they want to set this up then in a free market that's their prerogative. However I'd be wary of falling for the "this is to cut the evil Rightmove down to size" line.


Lets face it Estate Agents who already got a ridiculous % based fee for doing very little (why does it cost 3 times as much to take a few photos and give them to interested parties when the property is worth £300k rather than £100k?) have been pretty creative over the years in finding ways to get their noses in other troughs.


The first wheeze was the in house mortgage broker "Sorry sir we can only pass on your offer once you've been checked for viability by our mortgage broker" which not only gives them a chance to gain a load of commission by arranging the mortgage (another % fee - bit of a theme here) but also establish how much they can encourage their client to hold out for as they'll know all your financial affairs.


The next one was to start charging solicitors a referral fee, and only refer work to those that will pay. That's another chunk of cash out of the same job.


So now they've looked around and decided that if they didn't pay so much to the likes of Rightmove to advertise, they'd get to keep more for themselves.


This is about self interest and nothing more!

mjm3346

eddddy wrote: »

As the article says - the goal is to break the Rightmove/Zoopla duopoly - which has to be good.

More competition in the property portal market means lower pricing for the agents, which will hopefully get passed on in reduced EA fees.

I guess it's convenient that, at the moment, Rightmove is a one-stop-shop - but that's giving them too much freedom to increase their prices.

At the moment Agents can use Rightmove and Zoopla and any others they like, this move stops that and is an attempt to take over the market by only allowing one other site to be used and not allowing that site to have the properties until after they have been listed on the new site for at least 48 hours.

jamesd

Interesting to see some estate agents forming a cartel to limit trading choices of consumers.

I wonder how they propose to get around EU law that prohibits cartels?

Moneyer

Can they really get away with doing this for existing customers? If I'd placed my house with an agent on the understand they'd market it on Rightmove and Zoopla, I'd say removing it from either would put them in breach of contract and allow me to end the sole agency agreement….

Wolfsbane2k

My instant response is that this is cartel behaviour. Hope they get busted for it.

PasturesNew

Even when I was desperately searching, for a long time every day, I rarely stepped away from Rightmove as it was consistently the one site that gave me most properties without having to fight my way through duds, misinformation and out of date rubbish. 99.99% that I found on Zoopla were already on RM, so that was a waste of time most of the time.

Thrugelmir

jamesd wrote: »

Interesting to see some estate agents forming a cartel to limit trading choices of consumers.

I wonder how they propose to get around EU law that prohibits cartels?

Where's the cartel?