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OnTheMarket.com made misleading claims in TV ad

Christina Hoghton
Written By:
Christina Hoghton
Posted:
Updated:
05/09/2018

The Advertising Standards Agency has upheld a complaint that the property portal’s ads were misleading

Property search website OnTheMarket.com wrongly claimed in a TV advert many agents were exclusively advertising new properties with the portal 24 hours ahead of competitors, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled.

In an advert on television earlier this year, viewers were told: “Agents have moved to OnTheMarket.com from other sites and many are advertising their new properties exclusively with us first, 24 hours or more ahead of other portals.”

Complainants had challenged whether the claims were misleading and could be substantiated.

In response, Agents Mutual listed some of the estate agents that had committed to launch some or all of their new properties on the site before other portals.

Agents could upload properties themselves and decide which properties to reserve exclusively for OnTheMarket. In some cases, properties on the site were labelled as exclusive even though they appeared on other portals.

The ASA said viewers were likely to interpret the claim to mean that, with the exception of a very small number of properties only, these estate agents were advertising all their new properties exclusively with OnTheMarket for the first 24 hours.

The watchdog told OnTheMarket.com to ensure ads or claims did not suggest that all new properties listed by agents were advertised exclusively with OnTheMarket.com unless they held adequate evidence.

A second complaint regarding an OnTheMarket poster on the London Underground was not upheld.

The poster stated: “OnTheMarket gets thousands of new properties every month, 24 hours or more before Rightmove or Zoopla”.

ASA said depending on the search criteria used by a consumer evidence showed that several thousand new properties were exclusively advertised with OnTheMarket before other portals – and the claim was not misleading.