Ninety percent of agents who once engaged in unfair practices in order to manipulate their Rightmove listings and company profiles have now stopped since the portal juggling scandal broke last year, it has been claimed.

Robert May, an ex-agent and former Jupix operations director who built the software suite that uncovered the industrial scale on which portal juggling had been taking place, has told The Negotiator that most agents appear to have stopped.

“Everyone knows it’s wrong and now those doing it know it’s being detected – a couple of tweets at the right people at the right time made them realise it was serious,” he says.

While he was looking at the market, Robert says he discovered there were 11 ways that agents have been ‘gaming’ their listings to the top of Rightmove.

These included agents regularly taking all their properties down from Rightmove and then relisting them again to make it look as if they sell within a set period; changing the asking price after a sale has been completed to boost their average ‘achieved asking price’ and ‘double listing’ properties. This enables a single sale to look like two sales.

“I admire their spirit but what I don’t like is when agents then make claims about their performance that they can’t justify,” he says.

May’s software has caught out a huge range of agents involved from small local agents to online-only agents and also large corporates.

Robert also claims that his policing of agents’ behaviour on Rightmove has changed the way the portal lists properties, including keeping the ‘added on Rightmove’ date the same regardless of price updates.

“We went to see Rightmove after the portal juggling scandal broke and they were blow away by what our software could do,” says Robert.

“After all, we can assess every single transaction by every agent on Rightmove for a whole year in under three minutes.”

Although Robert says he wants to clean up the industry and achieve a level playing field so agents are competing on service rather than manipulating their listings, he is also planning to offer the industry an “incorruptible agent rating system” and an accurate transaction price index searchable down to postcode level.

“We can then say to people that ‘this is the best agent to sell your property’ based on performance,” he says. “Ours won’t be based on manipulated listings.”