WEB OF DECEIT: HOUSE HUNTERS TARGETED BY FAKE PROPERTY LISTINGS SCAMS
Government sends message that some real estate agencies are bending the rules and misleading clients
The Ministry of Interior has warned UAE house hunters about fake advertisements designed to lure them into buying non-existent property here and abroad.
“The public should be careful of scammers who use bogus listings inside and outside the country with the assistance of technology and social media platforms to dupe their victims into buying non-existent property,” said Brig Gen Salah Al Ghoul, director general of community protection and crime prevention at the ministry.
The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority is working to stop the scams, said Saif bin Gholeita, executive director of the authority’s technology development department.
Lukman Hajje, chief commerical officer for Propertyfinder Group, said websites that promote holiday accommodation were vulnerable to scams at this time of year, but he was not aware of any operating in the UAE.
But experts said fake listings on property portals were a “huge problem” for the country.
Imran Ellam, senior residential consultant at BespokeAD, said he only used pictures of the flat itself or type of flat for his listings, but the issue of incorrect pictures and fake listings was widespread.
“A client sent me photos saying ‘buy this immediately’,” Mr Ellam said.
“He thought they were photos of a one-bedroom apartment. But it was actually a three-bed terrace with a golf course view and they were advertising it as a one-bed.”
That happened for several reasons, he said. Part of it was the laziness of agents who did not have photos of the property he was dealing with, so they used pictures of another in the same development, regardless of size.
Some property websites require 10 photos before they are placed at the top of the page, Mr Ellem said. Then there were agents who did it to tempt home hunters, experts said.
“Lots of real estate agents use a tactic where they list something that doesn’t exist and then try and find it afterwards,” said Ben Crompton, managing partner of Crompton and Partners in Abu Dhabi.
“So they advertise a unit that they think should exist. And then they call the call centres who phone the owners to try to find the unit.”
That typically happens because the agents are from a small or new company and they do not have any units to rent.
Another major factor in the market is the fact that any agent can market any property that appears on the listings of property management companies.
“I have 3,000 units I could potentially lease but I don’t have exclusivity on,” Mr Crompton said.
“So I don’t know if they are gone or not unless the landlord tells me.”
Mr Hajje said Propertyfinder was aware of the issue of misleading property ads on portals such as his and was striving to address them.
“The only way to 100 per cent eliminate the practice is to go and photograph the properties yourself, or inspect every listing across 100,000 listings, which as you can appreciate is not very practical,” he said.
But the property portal has tried in recent years to combat the problem. Its efforts included establishing an online quality control team in 2013 to investigate all complaints, which can be made through the listings with the “report this property” button.
“If the complaint turns out to be valid, the offending broker loses ranking points,” Mr Hajje said.
“Essentially if you have a lot of penalties, the difference could be between you being on page 1 and on page 50.”
The following year, Propertyfinder also launched verified listings after complaints about misleading ads.
This ensures that properties marketed by agents who can prove they have the authority to do so by providing documentation, such as a copy of the owner’s passport, receive a higher ranking.
“If you go to our website you will find that the first few pages will all be verified listings,” Mr Hajje said.
Craig Plumb, head of research at JLL Mena, said it was up to the potential buyer or tenant to check any claims made by the agent about their property.
Other experts agreed that being careful about the agent you selected was a good start.
“Get a recommendation for a broker – someone a friend has used, maybe, and use that broker as opposed to responding to adverts because most of the time the adverts aren’t correct,” Mr Crompton said.
“And you end up going with a broker who is deliberately posting false information. It’s not a great start for the broker-client relationship.”
It is not the first time house hunters in the UAE have been targeted.
In 2014 The National reported that hundreds of people lost tens of millions of dirhams to bogus property agents in Abu Dhabi.
Most of the time the adverts aren’t correct. You end up going with a broker who is deliberately posting false information BEN CROMPTON Crompton and Partners