Rightmove referred to advertising watchdog over London Underground posters

ASA says claims by three complainants that 'every second someone contacts an estate agent about a home on Rightmove' were not misleading.

rightmove

Three complaints by member of the public about a Rightmove poster ad seen on the London Underground have been rejected by the Advertising Standards Authority.

Two posters, both of which made the claim that ‘every second someone contacts an estate agent about a home on Rightmove’ were reported to the advertising industry watchdog. Similar ads that were part of the same campaign are still available on the Rightmove resource hub and available for agents to download to use on social media.

Both posters used the claim alongside comparable statements, including ‘every second someone in the world gets married’ and ‘every second a bee flaps its wings 230 times’.

All three complainants challenged whether this claim could be substantiated by Rightmove. The portal told the ASA that agents received 42 million telephone and email leads every year via its various channels and that there were 31 million seconds in every year, or 1.3 enquiries every second.

Adjudication

“The ASA considered that consumers would understand the claim “every second someone contacts an estate agent about a home on Rightmove”, to mean that the number of times estate agents were contacted about homes listed on Rightmove was equivalent to once every second,” the adjudication says.

“We understood that the figure was based on the total number of enquiries estate agents received about Rightmove’s property listings in 2018.

“That equated to 1.3 enquiries every second over a year. We considered those figures were sufficiently robust as the basis for the advertising claim. We therefore concluded that the claim in both ads had been substantiated and was not misleading.”

This is the first time that Rightmove has been reported directly to the ASA since the advertising watchdog’s website began recording and storing complaint details.


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