An agent claims it has been removed from the Allagents site after refusing to pay for a service it did not want.
Conran Estates, which has branches in south-east London, was removed from the free reviews site last week.
Allagents says that the free profile of the firm, which had received 397 reviews and achieved a rating of 4.9, has merely been temporarily suspended – although this would not have happened if the firm had paid for an upgrade.
It also claims that Conran Estates had misused its previous ‘transparent agent’ status – something the agent totally denies.
Managing director Simon Hughes said problems began when Conran Estates paid for banners on Allagents.
He said: “We paid upfront for a year, but before our contract ended, I noticed that the banners had been taken off and a member of my staff said they hadn’t been there for some time – many months.
“When I pointed this out to Allagents, they said that I should have checked on a regular basis. However, I had assumed they would stick to the contract I had paid for.
“To be fair, Allagents did then put the banners back up again.
“However, I felt we had paid for a service we weren’t getting, and at a management meeting it was agreed we wouldn’t continue with it.
“I then received a demand from Allagents saying I owed it £1,320 for a renewal. Nowhere in my earlier contract had it stated that there would be an automatic renewal, and I refused to pay the invoice.
“Our page has now been removed, leading me to think that agents who do not pay the site have their pages taken down. Yet it is meant to be a free review site.”
Martin McKenzie of Allagents flatly denied what Conran Estates told us.
He said: “Their managing director claimed products paid for had not been available for a gap of some months, which was not the case. If he had known this to be a fact, why would he not have contacted us at the time? Conran Estates have NOT been de-listed because of non-payment of an invoice.
“Conran Estates had taken a number of advertising banners last year and they were invoiced for the automatic renewal of them to cover the following annual term.
“The agent had enjoyed access to the products for almost two months beyond the renewal invoice date, but only the other day, said they didn’t want to proceed.
“As they cancelled well after the renewal date, we have placed their profile in temporary suspension until the support team can get round to removing the products. Had we been giving notice of non-renewal prior to expiry date then there would not have been a need for this action. Conran were made fully aware of this.
“We had even offered an alternative ‘premium support plus’ account which would have given them much better value.”
McKenzie also claimed that Conran Estates had previously been expelled from the ‘transparent agent’ scheme.
McKenzie added that “every branch of every agent” can have a free basic listing on Allagents, but that due to new features on the site, including league tables and staff profiling, requiring extensive moderation, the site had become more costly to run.
He went on: “With the volume of branches and staff within the industry, there is constant updating and maintenance work required to keep the details on our site as accurate as we possibly can. When auditors come across profiles that require so much work that they affect the accuracy and credibility of our rankings, then we have no option but to temporarily remove the offending profiles and place them on our free ticket system.
“We provide free tools for every listed agent and branch to update their basic details. However, whenever an agent requires assistance with advertising and updating or correcting errors (normally due to their customers making the errors), then there is a need for our 'premium support plus' package.
“When agents call us, we advise them about this subscription support package and whilst many recognise and enjoy the benefits of it, others prefer to continue to use the free service.
“We have no issue with agents enjoying the free listing.
“By logging an enquiry online, we will look into the issue free of charge for them, but just like any other commercial business, our support team prioritise paid support work before the queued issues on the free ticket system.
“Paid support work is normally done live without the need to remove the profile from the live site. We do have a backlog in the free system; however, we do eventually get through it.
“We make it clear that because we continually require to stop and start free support work it is normally done off-line. This means that there are times when profiles are temporarily removed or suspended from the site to allow for this.
“Once completed, the agent’s profile is made live once again.
“If they want to be assured of uninterrupted access to their profile pages, then the only option open to the agent is to upgrade their membership to our ‘premium support plus’ package.”
McKenzie said the cost of the package varied from agent to agent. However, Conran Estates was offered it at £50 a month – which it declined to pay.
Hughes insisted that his version of events was true. He said the banners had been taken down without explanation. He said it was a “total lie” that his firm had been expelled from the ‘transparent agent’ scheme, and that the firm had been removed, again without explanation.
He said it was clear that Allagents wanted a fee for their services.
He said: “This is a free to use website with added products for sale which are not mandatory. Call me cynical, but they see us with 400 reviews and hold us over a barrel with a ‘pay or be removed’ ultimatum’. It is incredibly unethical.”
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Comments
They would not post 2 genuine reveiws in my city as it took me to their league leader, TOTAL CON SERVICE. They also only have a mobile number what is that about??
Well, as I have been lied to by allagents before, and had our profile removed without prior notice, it's certainly not the allagents' version of events I am going to believe.
He must be right p!@#$$#d off to go public about it! For £50 ! Month, you cant even get a rightmove logo for that. Me thinks Conran are probably wishing they had just paid the money now
Just hoping they don't try to pull me off !
Anything you have to pay to be on is not independent, a friend of mine relied on the Good Pub guide till they realised you have to pay to be in it!
The public will get the message eventually, this is not trip advisor of anything near as good, no one like being conned.
Watching with interest here, a new name is cropping up alot for feedback i see, ends in .me, we signed with them and generated alot of feedback fast.
I think agents forget this this site for consumers, NOT for agents. Its designed for consumers to read reviews about bad agents, not good ones. If good agents want to take advantage of It as an instruction winning tool ( which makes us our money) by getting their customers to post feedback on it, then why should Allagents have to pay for the addition moderation costs that come with this?? To be completely independent from agents, their income generation model needs to be designed so as to ensure that their moderation process is firewalled from their income revenue . If that cheeses agents off then they have a choice. Take out their premium support plus or walk away. Could you imagine what conran would be like if a customer asked them to market their property free co charge ! Grow up Simon
@smell a rat
"They are basically getting agents to spend time building up a large amount of reviews off the back that it's a 'free' site before using that to blackmail them into paying"
Yes, that's exactly what they did to us.
They did the same thing with ellis and co and cj hole, both were off the site for months so they must have paid them off as their profiles have been reinstated. They are basically getting agents to spend time building up a large amount of reviews off the back that it's a 'free' site before using that to blackmail them into paying. That is not the kind of business I would like to deal with.
Same here, crap website, can't get them to do anything unless you pay them money, the list goes on.
Sadly they've built up to a position that google enjoys, one of "I'm too big to care about anyone or anything." Try getting something amended, changed, banner modified, genuine reviews put through.
You can see the reviews that haven't been activated yet, and the reason they haven't been activated is because they send some email to "verify the listing" which is automatically junked by every email provider in the world. Unless they are pre-warned you can kiss your good feedback goodby.
Only the angry customers will bother to check if their review is posted, truthful or not...
I wonder if they remove agents with poor reviews or no reviews....
Yet another case of allagents demanding money and if they don't get it to just remove agents from their site. An underhand company with underhand ethics.
Its encouraging that Allagents are expelling paying customers from their transparency scheme if they are misleading the public . Agents like Conran should be ashamed of themselves and I hope that the customers who signed up to them because of their membership
@hmmm... We have an agent nearly next door who joined ea.me and he managed to get over 40 feedbacks in one month. We know its legit as well as some viewers we have shown round, we have managed to find out how..bit of detective work lol.
I wish they'd take us off the poxy thing!
Trying to get people to do a good review is so difficult as people just forget or can't be bothered. Yet the people who are unhappy will certainly make sure they make time for this
After much time and battle, for every 7/8 positive reviews (could easily be upto 50/60 if people just took 5 mins), it's then overshadowed by a single negative review
No doubt lots of agents have had similar experiences of their review page being manipulated without discussion, consultation or justification when they don't "fall in line"
This site is a shambles, we have asked our account to be removed from AA numerous times and never get a reply. We are now using estateagent.me, offers more as well than just feedback.