Relisted property trying to beat The BEE!

[Eddie001]

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property/101 ... ates_Aug08

This property has been on the market, on right move, for 18 months, possibly longer. I know because I've seen it appear on a few of my searches and keep thinking 240k? You must be joking (they are selling at 120k for a 50% share!).... Today I get a rightmove email alert that a new property has appeared, and it's this one...

Bee lists it now as a new entry for the 30th of August.

How is this trick done?

[philk]

I believe I have seen numerous occurences of this, i.e. properties appearing to be 'new' which the bee thinks are new. I believe that the agents are relisting the properties with new rightmove reference nos. I don't think that the bee will be able to overcome this kind of practice, as I believe it relies on the the rightmove property reference no? Any one know different?

[fiodyl]

I see this all the time as it is very common in my area for houses to be removed from Rightmove then relisted through another agent.

I'm not looking at a very large area though so it's not much of a problem for me as I can easily recognise the houses again.

One house I have been watching has done this alot, gruadually reducing down from £250k to £180k (which is 5k more than it was last bought for) and is also listed for rent (£900 down from £975)

It now has a duplicate listing as it is going to auction next month with a guide price of £140k, which is £10k less than they were sold for brand new 4 years ago.

Their neighbours next door however, have not dropped their asking price and are still holding out for £220k!

[Beerhunter]

I believe I have seen numerous occurences of this, i.e. properties appearing to be 'new' which the bee thinks are new. I believe that the agents are relisting the properties with new rightmove reference nos. I don't think that the bee will be able to overcome this kind of practice, as I believe it relies on the the rightmove property reference no? Any one know different?

Yes property bee uses the reference number.. so if a property is relisted, property bee (currently) looses (or should that be mislays) the history.

I don't think its any thing new or to stop property bee, but rather it becomes more obvious if you use property bee.

I do have a plan to overcome this.. but as you can imagine this is not an easy task, and hence is many months away from being a usable feature.

Once 2.0.4.0 is out (it's going into beta tonight) I start on 2.0.5.0 which will (if the plan goes right) include some more of the foundations for this feature. Although 2.0.5.0 will not provide the functionality, the hope is that it will start to capture some of the information needed, so that when the feature to link adverts together becomes available, there's a "backlog" of data available for it to use.

Cheers
BH

[Eddie001]

Excellent new BH. I've just downloaded and installed the latest update and it looks good

More power to your elbow mate.

[deeplyblue]

Just to add a note from a newbie to the Bee, but an old friend (?) of Right Move. I too do not think that the re-listers have their sights on PB. RM will have to have to entirely new reference number when a property is entered into their database by a new agent, as all of the details may be different. This leads to confusion when the same property is listed by several agents at the same time, as well.

I have also started to notice the same agent re-listing the same property, even at the same price - and I still think it has nothing to do with PB. I've seen a number of pieces of advice for agents, talking about how important it is to get things right (especially pricing) at the beginning, because of the "new listing" factor. I presume that most of the interest in any property comes in the first few weeks when it is on the market. Many people using RM for a quick inspection must use the "listed in the last 1/2/7/14 days option" to avoid looking at the same old properties they rejected last week and the time before - sometimes for months.

So sometimes an agent will make a minor change to the property description, and then "re-list" so that the same property will come up in the "new and interesting" list - even though it's old and tired. I suspect this trick will become quite common, and will probably make it more difficult for us on PB, as well as making the "only show me the new stuff" option on RM less useful.

Also, of course, people whose property is not shifting are going to be thinking more about adding extra agents to their list - thus producing more entries for the same property, and complicating matters further.

It has also occurred to me that, if PB keeps going strong, we are going to start seeing properties been bought and then sold again - which will make keeping track of them still more fun.

db

[jago25_98]

One way to fix this:

Compare the pictures! Do it a quick way first to save using lots of resources, like look at the filesize, then if there's a match compare the files in detail with an MD5 hash, if there's a definite match highlight the link and submit it to the bee.

Then, if they wish to relist they can go to the trouble of providing new photos instead of trying to cheat.

I'd like to help but I can't see where to submit a wish to the bug list. Is propertybee opensource or able to be charged for at a later date?