Ad description
A website for property listing page Houser Ltd, www.houser.co.uk, seen in March 2017, for a 4-bedroom detached house in Station Mews, Wragby , Market Rasen, Lincolnshire.
Issue
Newton Fallowell Estate and Letting agents, who had marketed the property, challenged whether the ad was misleading because the property had been removed from the market two years ago.
Response
Houser Ltd did not respond to the ASA’s enquiries.
Assessment
The ASA was concerned by Houser’s lack of response and apparent disregard for the Code, and ruled that they had breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rule 1.7 (Unreasonable delay). We reminded them of their responsibility to respond promptly to our enquiries and told them to do so in the future.
We considered that consumers would have understood from the ad that the property was still on the market, as it was still on the website.
We understood that it was, in fact, not and had not been for two years. The advertiser had not provided any evidence that it was and so we therefore concluded the ad was misleading.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 (Misleading advertising) and 3.7 (Substantiation).
Action
The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Houser Ltd to remove the property listing from their website, and to ensure that properties which were no longer on the market were removed from their listings. We referred the matter to the CAP Compliance team.
