A property portal for properties to let, OpenRent, has been ticked off by the advertising watchdog.
The site said on its pricing page that unlimited advertising cost £29 until the property was let. However, small print stated a fair use policy, saying that the site reserved the right to take down listings if there was abuse of the system – for example, if it generated a disproportionately high number of viewing requests, or was kept repeatedly online for over three months.
A complainant challenged whether the claims “unlimited advertising” and “advertise until let” were therefore misleading.
OpenRent said their fair use policy was made clear, and their terms clearly stated: “Although we don’t expect our fair usage limits to be breached by genuine landlords, we will remove all adverts which are generating a disproportionately high number of viewing requests (over 40 per advert), or where 3 months has elapsed from the time of publishing the ad.”
They said the policy affected less than 1% of their site listings and was to prevent abuse of their system, such as scammers leaving an advert online for as long as possible to gain exposure in order to harvest tenant details for unsolicited direct marketing, fraudulent or otherwise undesirable purposes; or to stop landlords with more than one property who attempted to use one listing to find tenants for multiple properties, and therefore avoided the usual fee payments.
OpenRent said their FUP was developed to ensure legitimate users were unaffected and this was borne out by statistics that showed the average days to let a property were 24 and the average inquiries per property numbered 11.9. They acknowledged that some legitimate customers would exceed those averages. However, their fair use policy limits allowed more than three times those figures before it was activated.
The Advertising Standards Authority said some legitimate customers would be affected by the policy, and that the words “unlimited” and “advertise until let” meant consumers were likely to expect that the services described were not subject to restrictions.
The website has been told to withdraw the claims.
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Comments
From a business-owner's point of view I can understand why the portal owners feel miffed. In their minds they're simply trying to stop genuine abuse.
However, the ASA were absolutely right to jump on this. If you want to attract customers with an eye-catching headline such as "Unlimited advertising for a fixed fee" then that is what you must offer.
On the other hand telecoms companies get away with something similar (unlimited calls and unlimited download - fair use policy applies) on a regular basis.