ICA closes without sanctions proceedings on Idealista's "No. 1 in Italy" claim

With a decision published on January 10, 2023, the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) closed, without issuing any sanctions in acceptance of the commitments of Idealista S.p.A ("Idealista"), the procedure in which it had contested unfair commercial practices relating to alleged misleading advertising where the company called itself "No. 1 in Italy" (the "claim").

 
This advertising claim was disseminated between May 2021 and March 2022, on both the website homepage and the Idealista app, without evidence to prove its truthfulness. In particular, the claim on the website homepage had initially been published without providing any further information relating to the parameters used to evaluate this claim (number of monthly visitors, number of ads published, total visits and app downloads). These were only added in March 2022 when the company included a link to another page providing these details.  However, it was not clear to the consumer that the link existed as it was not underlined nor did it contain any other graphic elements that indicated that it was a link. With regard to the claim on Idealista app, it also contained no explanation.

The proceeding was initiated based on a complaint by Immobiliare.it, which also disputed the parameters used by Idealista to assert its primacy in the market.

The ICA then challenged the possible violation of Articles 20, 21(1)(f) of the Consumer Code, i.e., in essence, that the dissemination of the claim, amounting to misleading advertising messages, constituted an unfair commercial practice, in that it was contrary to professional diligence and likely to materially distort the economic behaviour of consumers.

The ICA also found that the aforementioned conduct was likely to mislead consumers into believing that Idealista was the leading real estate operator in the market, without any possibility of verifying the reliability of the claims in question.

In response, Idealista submitted a statement of commitments, aimed at addressing the illegitimacy of the challenged commercial practices, pursuant to Article 27, paragraph 7, of the Consumer Code. Specifically, these commitments included:

-        the modification of the landing page of the site linked to the claim, in order to further clarify the parameters and metrics used to support the claim, and also including a special section dedicated to explaining the selection of the parameters;

-        the quarterly updating of the data supporting the claim;

-        the deletion of the claim should the updated data disprove the claimed leadership position;

-        the inclusion in the app, clearly visible and alongside the leadership claim, of a specific link ("why we are leaders") to an information page.

In the decision commented upon here, the ICA found that the parameters provided by Idealista in support of its claim were reliable and trustworthy, among other things because they came from reliable third-party sources. Moreover, the Authority found that the commitments proposed by Idealista were sufficient to improve information transparency regarding the supremacy position claimed by the company, thus overcoming the alleged misleading profiles of the claim reported by Immobiliare.it.

 
Thus, after a careful evaluation of the commitments in question, the ICA accepted them and made them binding, deeming them suitable to remedy the previously challenged unfair commercial practices. The proceedings were therefore concluded without a finding of any violation of the rules of the Consumer Code by Idealista and without the imposition of any sanctions against it.