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Late on a Friday afternoon in April 2017, Chris Wood, an estate agent and army veteran, received an email from a heavyweight London law firm.
Attached was a 12-page letter accusing Wood of defaming the online estate agent Purplebricks. The letter cited over a dozen tweets written by Wood. Most of them raised questions about “anomalies” he found in Purplebricks’ advertising and claims he thought were misleading. The lawyers asked him to delete the tweets and issue an apology or, the letter said, Purplebricks would sue him.
Wood, who has suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression, initially thought that it would have been easier to delete the tweets. “But I hate being bullied,” he says. “And I hate bullies.” So he wrote a detailed response, defending every point. “I haven’t heard a dickybird from them since,” he says.
Purplebricks – a company that claims to be saving the nation from the pain of dealing with traditional estate agents – is the largest online estate agent in the UK. In the highly competitive real estate market, reputation counts for everything and Purplebricks makes a big deal of its online standing. On its website, it boasts that it is “the most reviewed estate agent ever” and “the highest rated estate agent in the UK.” But an investigation has found evidence that Purplebricks tries to skew online reviews in its own favour, throwing doubt over the firm’s rosy online presence.
Founded in 2014 by brothers Michael and Kenny Bruce, today Purplebricks accounts for around 75 per cent of the UK’s online estate agency sector. Its model is simple. Purplebricks lists properties online for a fixed fee of around £1,000 – a fraction of the amount a traditional high street agent would charge. And while high street agents in the UK typically ask for payment only if they sell the property, with Purplebricks the fee is paid up front. In exchange, the online agent lists the property on a number of websites and claims a sale success rate of almost 80 per cent – it’s way higher than the traditional estate agents, which sell on average one in two homes.
At the time of writing, Purplebricks UK has racked up over 69,000 reviews on Trustpilot, the most popular review website for companies and services in the UK. An impressive 89 per cent of those achieve the top rung of Trustpilot’s five-point rating system: excellent. Seven per cent are great, one per cent average, one per cent poor and three per cent bad – that’s more than 66,000 positive reviews.
Compared to its rival online agents and online property portals, Purplebricks’ Trustpilot reputation is sparkling. Rightmove has 173 reviews on Trustpilot (36 per cent excellent, 36 per cent bad), Zoopla has 159 (18 per cent excellent, 72 per cent bad), Emoov has 2,157 reviews (83 per cent excellent, six per cent bad). Yopa, the most popular provider of this bunch, has 7,881 (88 per cent excellent, four per cent bad).
On other online reviews websites, Purplebricks’ reputation is less glowing. On AllAgents, it has an average rating of 1.3 out of five from 238 reviews. On reviews.co.uk it’s rated 1.6 out of five from 165 reviews. In December 2016, the firm stopped allowing people to directly leave ratings on its Facebook page. WIRED asked KwikChex, a website that tackles online distortion, to analyse Purplebricks’ reviews on Trustpilot. KwikChex’s investigation has found evidence that Purplebricks is most likely “gaming the system.”
“This doesn’t necessarily mean that thousands of fake reviews are being published,” says KwikChex director Chris Emmins, “but there are ways to ‘game’ or manipulate the system to achieve very strong results.” Emmins and his colleagues claim to have found evidence that Purplebricks is using a review-boosting method they call “selective review request”. This involves screening out customers that staff suspect are not satisfied, asking for reviews before homes are sold, incentivising staff to get customers to leave reviews and asking satisfied customers to leave multiple reviews.
“Having analysed the Purplebricks reviews, we believe that this practice is taking place,” Emmins says. KwikChex has monitored reviews on Trustpilot, including Purplebricks, for 18 months. The online investigators have examined “the semantics and phraseology of the reviews” and what they call the “patterns” of postings. They have also made contact with several Purplebricks former agents and consumers that have written both positive and negative reviews.
Emmins said that KwikChex had spoken to Purplebricks customers who confirmed that the firm strongly encouraged them to leave reviews before they had even sold their homes. “They were asked for reviews long before completion,” says Emmins. “Both [agents and customers] also confirmed that there was a method of asking for specific review content – mentioning the agent’s name being a prime factor and specifically praising the individual.”
KwikChex also found examples of another form of cherry-picking, with agents asking for extra reviews from customers who had left an initial positive review. In such circumstances, Emmins says, you will see “high volume, high frequency and more positive results." He adds that this “can seriously distort the online reviews profile to the advantage of a company.” But other customers – after leaving initial positive reviews – edited their existing reviews after they found that the subsequent Purplebricks’ service didn’t match their initial high impressions.
Lorraine Spencer, a Purplebricks customer, left a five-star review on Trustpilot in July 2017. Ten months later, she decided to update the review and change the ratings to one star. “I initially recommended Purple Bricks on this website shortly after our house was put on the market,” she wrote. “I was asked to do this by their agent and was happy to do so at the time. Given the reviews on [Trustpilot] I expect they ask most customers to do this before they find out how useless they are.”
Lorraine complained that, after eight months, her property only had one viewing and she thought that Purplebricks “treats customers with contempt”.
A Purplebricks spokesperson refuted the allegation that the company tries to skew its online feedback in favour of positive reviews. “Everyone selling with us has the opportunity to leave an honest review of their experience. We do not pick and choose which customers should leave a review – and we do not seek to get reviews removed,” they say.
Until last week, Purplebricks’ profile on Trustpilot stated that it had no evidence that the company collected reviews. After we submitted some of the evidence from this article to Trustpilot, the review site changed Purplebricks’ designation to “regularly asking for reviews – whether good or bad”.
“In keeping with Trustpilot’s best practice policy, we ask everyone selling with us to leave a review of their experience with Purplebricks at the Sold Subject to Contract (SSTC) stage via a customer email,” says the Purplebricks spokesperson. “Lettings customers are asked for feedback at the “Move In” stage also via email. We work closely with Trustpilot to ensure our policies and practices are market leading, fair and transparent.”
But former Purplebricks agents have said the company strongly encouraged staff to chase down reviews from customers. Ian Foster, a former Purplebricks agent, told Estate Agent Today that “at times around 80 per cent of the communication we got [from the company] about customers was ‘get the Trustpilot [review], get the Trustpilot’. Most customers got three reminders by text or email and the agents were then asking them to review as well.”
One popular method used, according to another former Purplebricks agent who spoke on condition of anonymity, is sending out review templates to fill. “There are many templates made by [Purplebricks’] local property experts that ask for a review and copy in the link,” the agent says, adding that during Purplebricks’ two-week training, “you are encouraged to ask for reviews.”
“If we find that any company is violating our guidelines, we investigate and take appropriate action. If a company is found to be in breach of our guidelines, we can issue warnings, formal cease and desist proceedings and ultimately a Consumer Alert on its Trustpilot page, letting the world know of attempts to mislead consumers,” a Trustpilot spokesperson says.
“Our compliance team is currently undertaking a full investigation into the invitation methods being utilised by Purplebricks. We have previously sent a legal letter to the business requesting further explanation around some of their invitation practices and a meeting is scheduled to take place next month. Should it be deemed that the company is in breach of our guidelines action will be taken,” they say.
WIRED has also found evidence that Purplebricks challenges negative reviews on Trustpilot. David, a Purplebricks customer, left a one star review in July 2017 and updated it a few hours later: “Less than 10 minutes after this review went up Purplebricks asked Trustpilot for it to be removed,” he says.
“Trustpilot has a process so reviews that can’t be attributed to a customer can be queried,” Purplebricks’ spokesperson says. “We actually challenge twice as many three, four and five star reviews as we do one and two star reviews. Like all processes our system is not infallible and we will look closely into any reviews that are drawn to our attention. We are in constant contact with Trustpilot about these issues and how to improve our operations to ensure all our processes are fully compliant.”
Encouraging customers to provide positive reviews while nuking bad ones would undoubtedly boost Purplebricks’ numbers, but even taking into account all this, its Trustpilot presence seems inordinately high. Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication at the University of Stanford and an expert in fake reviews, says that the numbers and pattern of reviews for Purplebricks “look extremely suspicious.”
Hancock, who analysed a number of Purplebricks reviews for this article, says: “Just to see 68,000 reviews is pretty shocking. The distribution doesn’t look right either and seems very suspicious to me. Because there are so many [reviews], we should see what we call a J distribution.”
He explains that the most successful companies and services will usually have lots of 5-star reviews, some good, very few middle and poor and then an uptick in the bad ones – a distribution that looks like the letter J. “There’s a little bit of an uptick at the bottom here but it’s like a thousand one stars out of the 60,000 five stars. They’re all five stars. It looks more like an I.”
“Our most recent investigation showed no evidence of a pattern of fake or fabricated reviews, nor evidence of abuse of our reporting function,” a Trustpilot spokesperson says. “However, we did determine some invitational practices to be biased and in breach of our guidelines, especially those involving only triggering invitations at the Sale Subject to Contract stage of the selling process." The investigation is ongoing and expected to be concluded within the next few weeks, Trustpilot says.
Trustpilot added that its lawyers have sent a letter requesting Purplebricks to change these practices. If Purplebricks doesn't take action, Trustpilot will take "further action up to and including a public Consumer Alert."
Purplebricks might have a bigger problem than protecting its online reputation. The very future of the company appears to be uncertain, as its latest annual results showed losses of £52m and the company has seen 75 per cent of its share price wiped off since its peak in 2017.
In May, Purplebricks’ co-founder, Michael Bruce suddenly quit and later the same month the company shut its Australian branch. Two months later, it announced it was withdrawing from the US market – only a couple of years after starting operations there. Purplebricks says that the decision to exit the two businesses has “given us the opportunity to refocus on our UK and Canada businesses.”
Purplebricks is not the only property agent struggling. According to a survey by the accountancy firm Moore Stephens, 27 per cent of estate agents are in “financial distress”. In April, Chris Wood shut his own estate agency after 18 years. Although he has left the property world and hasn’t heard from Purplebricks’ lawyers since responding to their letter, he still keeps a close eye on them. “I’ve spent a lot of my time, far too much of my time, when I should have been selling houses, looking at these things,” he says. “But I want to see justice. I just want justice to be done.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
