Private Property COO says they are engaging with FNB

MAIN IMAGE: Mark Coetzee, COO of Private Property

Mark Coetzee, COO of property portal Private Property, issued the following statement in response to requests from their clients that their listings be removed from the feed to First National Bank (FNB) as a consequence of the latter’s newly launched feature on their banking app enabling FNB customers to sell their homes directly to other customers.

Dear Valued Partners,

I’m sure you have all been keeping up to date with the recent discussions surrounding a press release from FNB in which they announced a new feature on their NAV home platform, allowing FNB customers to list and sell their homes directly to other FNB customers. We understand and appreciate that FNB’s new offering may be of concern to some of you and therefore considered it vital to communicate where we stand as a business as regards this feature development and how it affects our relations with FNB.

Private Property have had a long standing commercial relationship with FNB whereby we syndicate listings to their banking platform. The reason we adopted this strategy was to ensure your properties are available to a wider audience of property buyers and sellers in order to generate the most leads possible to boost sales for you, our real estate partners. Importantly, all leads generated are always linked back to the advertising agent and property ownership details are never disclosed.

However, we do understand that this new feature may be seen as step in the direction of a direct to consumer strategy by FNB so, although we are bound by our commercial terms with FNB, we are nonetheless engaging with them urgently to give them the opportunity to respond to the concerns that have been raised. We’ve also received requests from some of our real estate partners to remove their listings from the feed to FNB but would request that you please give us the opportunity to further engage with FNB to find a solution that addresses your concerns. We still believe that a strong relationship with FNB will be beneficial to the stakeholders in Private Property so would really like to find a solution that works for all.

We appreciate your strong feeling on this issue and will endeavour to resolve this as quickly as possible. We will keep you updated as we make progress and thank you for your continued support and patience as we navigate the rapidly changing property market in South Africa.

Please can I ask that you pass this communication on to your networks as well.

Ends.

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