On the afternoon of Monday 10 January, Riccardo got in touch with this message:
A Lucca estate agent (LuccAbita) had posted our house for sale on idealista (Italian equivalent of RightMove). The pictures were presumably from an earlier listing before we purchased and included the misleading pictures of the swimming pool we had seen at that time. My guess was that they were re-posting our house to get enquiries from people who they could then tell that the property was no longer available and go on to suggest alternatives that they actually had on their books. Apparently, this is a marketing technique known as Bait & Switch.
My response to Riccardo was:
For fun, I did use the iealista web site to request a viewing. LuccAbita responded the following day by email asking me to call them (as I had withheld my number from the request). I explained that I was in the UK and asked them to let me know how long the property had been on the market and to confirm it was available for viewing now. Their response to that was to apololgise and inform me that they had checked with the vendor who told them it had been sold.
Seeing as how the vendor is a friend, I contacted Domenico to ask whether they had, in fact, been in touch. It turned out he had been contacted, but not by LuccAbita. One of their competitors (Immobiliare Il Baluardo – that he had used previously) had spotted the listing and contacted him to ask if the house was for sale again. When Domenico replied that the house had been sold, this agent suggested that maybe the new owners had put it up for sale. In Domenico’s email, he said “For a moment I became sad, but now your message has reassured me”.
The listing was taken down on Wednesday so everything is back to normal. Not good practice by LuccAbita, however, who listed a property they did not have for sale and then misled me about contactacting Domenico.
Interestingly, the blurb posted with the listing contained this text:
evocative building of 1870 formerly “La Pace” inn
Domenico has previously told us that the house was a kind of restaurant run by his family and this tidbit of information from the listing reminded me that he had agreed to write us a brief history of the house and his family’s association with it. I reminded him of this and hope to receive it next time we see him and Paola.
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