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Written by Rosalind Renshaw

Rightmove has warned agents that listing properties on eBay could be fraught with dangers.

Managing director Ed Williams spoke out after property portal PropertyIndex allegedly did a deal with eBay.

eBay has just launched a property search facility on its site, which has 20 million unique visitors a month – dwarfing all the leading property portals put together. All the properties placed there appear to have come from agents who use the pay-per-lead PropertyIndex service.

However, eBay will also accept private sellers’ listings on exactly the same terms.

Williams, who led a fight against Tesco’s attempt to break into the property portal market, said: “It seems that PropertyIndex is using agents listings as a Trojan horse by which eBay could effectively cut out agents from the sales process all together. We do not believe that PropertyIndex makes it clear to agents as to how they will use their properties.”

PropertyIndex chief executive  Lee Bramzell said Rightmove’s criticism was ‘desperate’.

He said: “It’s a reminder of the film The Village. Rightmove has started trying to scare estate agents in the village about the apparent dangers of life outside, so they think it’s safer to stay locked up in the house with Rightmove. Anything that gives estate agents greater exposure to the market is a major benefit for estate agents.”

He added: “Clearly, a major annoyance for Rightmove has been the arrival of a number of Rightmove staff at PropertyIndex.”

PropertyIndex has recruited some of the Rightmove sales staff made redundant at the end of last year.

The first was John Page, former Rightmove head of London sales who is now PropertyIndex’s head of UK field sales. Since then, Page has hired 12 former Rightmove sales staff, including a new Rightmove recruit who joined ProperyIndex this week.

PropertyIndex, launched last September, says it has had a 148% increase in estate agents joining in the last month, with over 6,000 agents now signed up.

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