CIELA again shrugs off sabre-rattling by PurpleBricks lawyers:
May 19, 2017
CIELA again shrugs off sabre-rattling by PurpleBricks lawyers, reiterates public request for substantiation of “completed sale” rate.
In response to this Telegraph article, PurpleBricks’s lawyers have written to CIELA for a second time claiming that the statement by CIELA Founder Charlie Wright is defamatory.
CIELA has today (Wednesday) responded (attached) to Norton Fulbright’s letter dismissing their letter as classic corporate bullying tactics with no substance and requesting clarification of the facts.
Charlie Wright said “We fully stand by our position that Purplebricks adverts are misleading because they compare its services to those of indepdent agents, and claims to perform better at a lower cost. This necessarily implies that the services are substantially similar, when in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
But more importantly, CIELA must not succumb to such corporate tactics – bullying that almost always results in small business owners hushing up, purely due to legal intimidation. This is the kind of behaviour that corporates get away with all the time and cannot be tolerated. It breeds an environment in which only the giants with heavy resources may play, and eliminates the chance of transparency and accountability. This has an unfair knock-on effect for unwitting consumers and agents alike. We must resist such indirect market manipulation; hence CIELA’s publication of its response to Purplebricks in full.
We invite Purplebricks to refute this view with hard evidence which proves otherwise. We will not hold our breath though, as it has consistently ignored many public requests for transparency and substantiation, for obvious reasons.”
Shared by: Charlie Wright charlie.wright@ciela.co.uk
You May Also Enjoy
Prime London property stock falls 3.4% in Q3
The latest Prime Central London Stock Index by Benham and Reeves has revealed that the number of properties listed for sale at £2m or above fell by -3.4% during the third quarter of 2026, leaving 3,778 prime homes on the market. While Kensington, Notting Hill and Chelsea recorded modest increases in available stock, several established prime…
Read More 
When a chain breaks: how bridging can keep a sale moving
Every agent knows the call. A buyer further down the chain has pulled out or their mortgage has stalled, and a sale you have worked on for months is about to fall apart. Often the person caught in the middle could still buy if they did not have to wait for their own sale. That…
Read More 
Four in ten homes see asking price reduced
More than four in ten homes currently listed for sale across England have already seen their asking price reduced, according to the latest market analysis by eXp UK, with the number of reduced properties climbing by 3.6% since August. eXp UK analysed property listings across England to establish how many have undergone an asking-price reduction.…
Read More 
Breaking Property News 19/10/26
Daily bite-sized proptech and property news in partnership with Proptech-X. Last week Sourced Living began rolling out Genifea across its branches, the platform’s first commercial CRM integration. By Author Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR Andrew Stanton spoke to founder Pragati Dhingra about what the Genifea platform actually does, where AI fits in an estate agency,…
Read More 
Mixed signals in UK construction as contract awards rise, but starts fall
Detailed planning approvals declined 16% against the preceding three months and fell 28% lower than last year, a warning sign for future work. Main contract awards dropped 19% against the last three months but climbed 25% year-on-year, a sign that major schemes are being committed. Project starts took the steepest fall, declining 26% against the…
Read More 
Estate Agents Brace for Rising Compliance Costs
Nearly two-thirds of compliance leaders in estate agencies and property firms expect budgets to increase amid growing pressures Just 6% expect cuts, down from 31% last year, while 63% now work weekly overtime on AML The majority of senior compliance professionals in UK property firms and estate agents expect their budgets and teams to grow…
Read More