Pushy real estate agent from French-speaking Switzerland
causes unrest in the real estate community
Controversial “web crawling” service: French-speaking Swiss real estate agent meets with widespread opposition in the industry
Web Crawling“ – on the edge of legality
A real estate agent with national ambitions, known through television advertisements, caused considerable controversy in western Switzerland with a third-party data use. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. The boundaries between ethical and unethical behaviour are often blurred in the real estate field. Unfortunately, the company in question is no laudable exception.
In this specific case, real estate advertisements were copied and passed off as own offers. This is for the purpose of potential property buyers depositing your personal data with a third party provider.
Misusing other people’s data to deceive third parties for their own use. Based on this, develop competition-distorting marketing slogans and deliberately deceive customers. Isn’t something like this illegal in terms of competition law and data protection?
Could Coop, for example, copy the entire Migros, Spar and Volg product range from the internet and offer it as its own?
Could a large company get hold of SMEs’ customer data in this way? Would this be theft or legal action to maximise profit?
A legal audit is regrettably lacking, as legal cases take forever and the damage is difficult to prove.
Therefore, the real estate industry is at least drawing attention to this and hopes that the customer will be more conscious of his data on the one hand and focus on fair play on the other.
In response, the Swiss Real Estate Industry Association (SVIT) published an article highlighting the practices of the broker in question and bringing the controversy further into focus.
This matter is likely to continue to be controversial in the circles concerned and will most likely lead to a more thorough investigation of the use of web crawling in the real estate sector.
