Reviews website allAgents has reinstated Purplebricks’ reviews on its site including “the majority” of the negative ones and half of the questionable ‘five-star’ postings that sparked a two-month spat between the two organisations.
allAgents says it has not reposted half of the ‘five star’ reviews after the people who originally wrote them failed to respond to checks by the reviews website’s team, and that it will in future only be accepting reviews from vendors who have sold their homes via Purplebricks or “withdrawn from the agreement with Purplebricks”.
“We will continue not to allow duplicate postings by the same client for the same transaction. This will give a more complete picture of Purplebricks’ service, as customers may feel very different at the end of the process, than they do at the pre-sales stage,” says allAgents’ Martin McKenzie.
This would appear to end the three-month long dispute between Purplebricks and allAgents, which saw the hybrid agent threaten legal action over 26 negative reviews posted on the agent reviews site.
Negative reviews
Purplebricks claimed the negative reviews were fake and, after allAgents investigated, only three could not be verified, suggest that they may not have been real. A further were five were also taken down by allAgents, leaving 18 reinstated.
In response to the legal threat, allAgents replaced the Purplebricks landing page on its site with a call for funds to raise £50,000 on a crowdfunding site to pay for the legal cost of fighting the agency, a sum that it nearly succeeded in reaching.
“We stand behind the reviews, which have been proven to have been written in good faith,” says Martin McKenzie (pictured, left)
“The ‘Fakegate’ has been shown to be just what it always was – the bully-boy tactics of a company unwilling to deal with the concerns of genuine customers.
“Our re-instatement of Purplebricks’ review profile and the disputed reviews has shown how solid our process is, and we sincerely hope Purplebricks will accept this and not threaten further legal action.
“We were unable to verify just three of the reviews, not surprising as some of them were two years old and three genuine reviewers have asked for their post to be taken down.
“A number of reviewers were very angry at having their authenticity questioned and we have decided to add their additional comments to the site.”
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