ASA Adjudication on Stags

Ad

Three ads for Stags estate agent were placed in various regional publications in the West Country. a. One ad stated "On average every Stags office will give you access to 40% more buyers. Contact us for a market appraisal and we'll show you how". b. A second ad stated "The internet is the pre-eminent property advertising medium. www.stags.co.uk is the world's most visited website for West Country property (Hitwise May 2007). Contact us for a market appraisal and we'll show you how to ensure your property is displayed where it will be seen". c. A third ad stated "www.stags.co.uk is the world's most visited website for West Country property. If you want your house to be seen, call us".

Issue

BigBlackHen.com objected to the claims:

1. "On average every Stags office will give you access to 40% more buyers";

2. "www.stags.co.uk is the world's most visited website for West Country property (Hitwise May 2007)"' and

3. "www.stags.co.uk is the world's most visited website for West Country property.

CAP Code (Edition 11)

Response

1.  Stags said the claim was intended to mean that Stags's central database on average gave every Stags branch access to 40% more buyers.  They said the claim referred to the percentage of buyers who first registered with one Stags branch but who subsequently purchased a property that was offered by one of their other branches.

2. & 3.  Stags said the claims were based on Hitwise's ranking of all UK websites in the property category in April 2007, and that they monitored their position on the Hitwise rankings each month and found little variation.  Stags had calculated the percentage of West Country property on the websites of the agents who were ahead of them in the ratings and had applied that percentage to the number of visits recorded and listed in the Hitwise statistics.  They said it was well known that buyers moved to the West Country from other areas of the UK.  They said that in 2006 one-third of buyers of West Country property came from outside the region.

Stags acknowledged that the claim should have been worded to say www.stags.co.uk was the world's most visited Estate Agent's website for West Country property.

Stags said each of the ads had appeared once in its particular paper in the September and October 2007 period and they would not be running them again.

Assessment

1.  Upheld

The ASA noted that Stags intended the claim to refer to buyers who were already registered with one branch of Stags but who then purchased a property registered with one of their other branches.  We considered, however, that the claim was likely to be understood as a comparative claim that Stags provided access to 40% more buyers than other estate agents.  Because the evidence Stags had supplied did not substantiate that claim, we concluded that the ad was misleading.

On this point the ad (a) breached CAP Code clauses 3.1 (Substantiation), 7.1 (Truthfulness) and 19.1 (Other comparisons).

2. & 3.  Upheld

We noted that the evidence for the claims was based on Hitwise data.  We understood that Hitwise were a well-recognised company that produced website visit statistics for a wide range of companies.

We also noted, however, that Stags had provided Hitwise data from a single month and that the calculations they had made were based on an assumption that it was possible to calculate the proportion of the total number of visits to a property website that related to a particular region from the proportion of the total number of properties on the website that were from that region. We considered that while the Hitwise data would accurately count the number of visits to a company's website, it did not go so far as to break down those visits between the particular regions that were represented on those websites.  We noted Stags's explanation regarding the proportion of buyers that came from outside the West Country region but did not consider they had shown they were justified in interpreting the Hitwise data in the way they had.  Because the evidence Stags had supplied did not substantiate the claims, we concluded that the ads were misleading.

Ads (b) and (c) breached CAP Code clauses 3.1 (Substantiation), 7.1 (Truthfulness) and 19.1 (Other comparisons).

Action

We welcomed Stags's confirmation that the ads would not appear again and told them not to repeat the claims in future similar ads.

Adjudication of the ASA Council (Non-broadcast)