Will realestate.com.au sell buyer leads?

As a buyer or tenant, would you stop enquiring through realestate.com.au if they were to on sell your information to third parties.

Business 2 Article Here

Business 2
Realestate.com.au have been selling ads on emails, enquiry forms and just about anywhere they could shove an ad but this seems to infer it will be the lead itself that is sold on to other parties. The name email and phone number of the enquiring party. There is no question at all that this information is valuable but is is theirs to sell?

This is going to be interesting if it happens but the privacy concerns are going to be high. I think its reasonable to assume that a buyer expects their enquiry is a private communication between themselves and the agent on the property listing. They do not believe that they will be contacted by all these other companies.

Now they can do this transparently with tick boxes at the bottom of the enquiry form or they can hide their authority in a revised terms and conditions on the website. I actually dont have a problem if they transparently have tick boxes (unticked by default of course) on an enquiry form but realestate.com.au have not had a problem doing this sort of thing in the past. They have form!

To sell information to RPData they added the following clause into their terms and conditions “by using the Service, you grant us an irrevocable, world-wide, royalty free licence to commercialise, copy, license to other persons, use and adapt for any purpose any material you generate or submit to make use of the Service.”. We covered this back in 2008 on Business2

If the right to pass on leads is not open and transparent this is going to cause some real concerns. Many agents earn referral fees or commissions from these types of companies so that income is potentially threatened. As agents in Queensland (and I assume most states have similar requirements) we have to fully disclose to buyers any commercial arrangements we have with these sort of companies so the potential for confusion is going to be high. In some cases the agent may cop the blame for passing on the private information when the truth is we were not involved.

This is pure speculation at this stage and it is important to note that this has not been confirmed by Realestate.com.au yet.

Lest us know what you think?? If realestate.com.au does start selling your leads to finance companies, telcos, utility companies and others how will it effect you?

I'm not sure if anyone has been prompted and filled out the latest survey that pops up on realestate.com.au. I did and was interested to know some of the questions they were asking within the survey does lean towards this article having substance.

I would be interested to know if this would stop you from emailing an agent if this became a reality?
 
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