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Written by Rosalind Renshaw

Lee Bramzell, who heads up the pay-per-lead portal Property Index which is thought to have done a deal to list its subscribers’ properties on eBay, has admitted that some properties have been accidentally ‘scraped’.

He has also apologised, whilst saying that few agents have been affected.

Some agents have been surprised to find their properties listed on both Property Index and eBay, when they had not bought into either.

Bramzell, who remains tight-lipped on any deal with eBay, admitted it was true that some agents’ properties had found their way on to his site, but insisting it was for well-intentioned reasons.

It is also understood that those agents have not exactly complained about the free additional advertising, and that some have been pleasantly surprised to find themselves on eBay – albeit without their knowledge.

eBay gets 20 million unique visitors every month, far larger than the total of 5 million who visit a combination of Rightmove, Propertyfinder and Primelocation. eBay has only just launched a property listing.

Bramzell said: “What has happened is that our own site has grown so fast since our launch last September that we had to outsource some of the work involved, as we had a backlog of work in getting agents live: 7,000 have so far subscribed to our service.

“Our policy is that we do not ‘scrape’ other portals. We only admit agents who have signed up to our non-subscription service including the small independents who do not have the software resources to upload to us. For them, we have borne the cost of getting them on to our service.

“However, the first batch sent to us by our new supplier included properties from agents who had not signed up. It is proving quite a time-consuming task to de-dupe these properties and these agents. In addition to this complication, we are still taking on new signings at the rate of 1,000 agents per month.

“We are, of course, very sorry. I can only say that the only listings we want on Property Index are from those agents prepared to pay for our service, which is all about paying for results, rather than paying for exposure.”

The eBay property listing, of both UK and overseas homes, now appears on the auction site, but has not yet had a major launch. However, it is known that eBay regards property as the largest potential market still to be tapped.

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