Ghost sales deception comes back to haunt estate agent

Ghost sales deception comes back to haunt estate agent

An estate agent's novel way of coping with the property slowdown cost him rather more than he expected, a court heard yesterday. Mark Halls put up "sold" signs on carefully chosen empty properties which had nothing to do with him and had never been on the market, to give the impression that his firm was the one to watch.

The ploy gave an unexpected strength to some of the entries in the "what customers say" section of the website of his firm, Seatons, of Ipswich, Suffolk. One comment said: "We couldn't believe the variety of properties you had available", and another described the number of viewings as "astonishing".

The experienced agent, who had dealt with houses in the Ipswich area for 28 years, picked a selection of properties for his scam in streets where the market had particularly slowed. Amid the usual crop of optimistic "for sale" boards, his "sold" ones for Seatons Estate Agency, of which Halls, 46, was the managing director, stood out.

Unfortunately they stood out a little too much, magistrates in Ipswich were told, as a neighbour of one of the houses advertised in Melton, across the Orwell estuary from Ipswich, knew that the property was not for sale. She contacted Suffolk county council's trading standards department, which investigated and found that the scam had run for more than a year.

The court was told that Halls, who runs branches in Woodbridge and Ipswich, had copied political flyposters in trying to give the impression.....continued below

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of widespread support.

A spokeswoman for the trading standards department said: "Mr Halls said that these misleading signs were put up in the hope that it would stimulate business."

Yesterday Halls admitted incidents going back to October 2006 and was fined £7,500 for the deception.

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