Estate agents: new medium, old tricks

Estate agents get a lot of bad press. Having had a least a few friends who’ve dabbled in helping people buy or sell property, I want to think the generalisations are unjust, yet every time I get to that point, something knocks me back. And today, speeding around in Laijla’s sporty BMW, looking at places in West London, I get another one of those knock-backs. Here’s why…

To save embarrassment, and probably sure law suits, we’ll call Laijla’s agency ‘A’ and her rivals ‘B’. I’ve never bought from either, but always liked agency A. Recently in their brochure they were gutsy enough to describe one mews house as having ‘its wiring shot to pieces, an interesting collection of mushrooms in the interior, and in need of a complete make-over.” You have to agree, it’s a tad more honest than the standard lines of ‘scope to redesign, unique property, great potential’ that you’d expect.

But when I tell agent A that agent B said they ‘work together’, it did unlock a minor explosion in an otherwise flawless behaviour. “Well, if having my manager phone them up and ask them to stop stealing our properties and posting them on their own websites is working together, then yes, you could say that!”

“Seriously?” [By the way, I’m really not making this up]

“It all began when we started getting a lot of calls from them to check availability on some of our places; a lot of calls. I was thinking ‘wow, that’s really impressive’ as agents don’t often do that. Remember that many agents will market properties they don’t have a direct relationship with the landlord over, but it’s controlled. We agree who will represent what and how commissions will be split. But then we went to their website and saw they were just copying our entire database. Everything was there.”

Conclusion? The scraping of websites isn’t confined to the spammers, email harvesters, and other bottom-dwellers native to the digital food chain. Firms with low morals and no ethics from the traditional economy can extend their approaches to the digital networked economy, making the web, well, just like everywhere else. But maybe, the very transparency that helped Laijla’s team see what they were up to could help expose them for what they are.