'David' tilts at giant Rightmove

In the latest battle of the property portals, Brightmove (16 agents, 239 properties worldwide) is squaring up to Rightmove (11,500 estate agents, 1m properties, and that’s without the lettings, holiday and developers sections).

Brightmove’s name was, says its founder, registered on January 4, 2000, and the Rightmove trademark later that year.

Mike Osborn, who says Brightmove was a paying portal from the word go, has received letters from Rightmove’s lawyers suggesting he is passing off Rightmove’s name and implying that he is exploiting their huge investment in marketing.

As a result, Osbsorn has now dropped his strapline ‘Make the right move with Brightmove’. He has also stopped called Brightmove ‘The number one UK and worldwide internet property website’. Rightmove brands itself ‘The UK’s number one property website’ and has done so since 2001.

Instead, Brightmove now calls itself ‘The future No 1 internet property website’.

After hearing from Rightmove lawyers, Osborn also agreed to change the way Brightmove was branded, when the ‘B’ appeared in a different colour to the ‘rightmove’.

Osborn says he also received the ‘small threat’ of legal action. He said: “It's a good job I not someone of a nervous disposition. I think I would have had a sleepless night or two.
Actually, come to think of it – I did actually have a sleepless night or two. But that was because of the cat jumping at each round of gunfire from the local firing range.”

But now Osborn has retaliated, saying that, if anything, Rightmove could be passing itself off as Brightmove. He says he is now considering legal action.

Osborn has also taken issue with a statement on Rightmove’s site which says that in 2002, they were the first property portal to introduce charging for properties for sale.

Yesterday he wrote to the Office of Fair Trading accusing Rightmove of making a false claim, and maintaining that Brightmove was the first portal to charge for listings.

Osborn, a former high street agent who now runs a virtual estate agency, admitted to Estate Agent Today that in fact he does not charge agents to list, despite his site saying it does.

It warns customers that once they have uploaded their properties, they can expect to be asked for payment. “But I am still building the site up, so it would be unfair to charge agents,” said Osborn. “However, the charging model has been there from day one and it is mentioned because I do charge private sellers.”

Osborn charges them £49 as a one-off fee to list their properties: “You can take a view on private sales and mine is that they make a pig’s ear of selling their homes and sooner or later need an agent to do it for them. I therefore regard it as sensible to identify these private sellers to estate agents sooner rather than later.”

Rightmove, which denies heavy-handed tactics against Brightmove, has always refused to accept private sellers.

Osborn, who is the sole employee of Brightmove as against the 240-strong Rightmove staff, and runs his company from his pad in Southsea as opposed to Rightmove’s headquarters in Soho Square, London, said: “When I launched Brightmove in 2000, I also registered Brightmove.co.uk

“I was very into IT and had become a virtual estate agent in 1997, so I consider I was ahead of my time. I rather put Brightmove on one side because the property market was booming and I was busy. The trigger to relaunch it came in 2007 when I was rung up by a television researcher who wanted to know about different ways of selling your home. It is now very much my baby.”

In his complaint to the OFT, Osborn said: “I am [also] considering legal action against Rightmove for possibly passing off my business name. Rightmove trademarked their name in autumn 2000 using the same name as my business/domain name and dropping off the B, thus passing off the good name of my business and causing confusion.

“Obviously Brightmove is the prime name and Rightmove is a derivative of this name.”

Osborn told EstateAgent Today he realised that some people would find the story about his challenge to Rightmove absurd: “But I hope it brings a smile to their faces,” he said. “This is a David and Goliath battle.”

A spokeswoman for Rightmove said: “Rightmove is a registered trademark, and whilst it would be inappropriate to comment in detail, we can confirm that following recent concerns regarding the possible infringement of our trademark, we have been in contact with Brightmove.co.uk.

“We were pleased that Brightmove has since made appropriate changes to its website to deal with our concerns. If there are any issues on the part of Brightmove regarding the Rightmove website and our registered trademark, we would welcome hearing from them directly so that the matter can be dealt with appropriately.”