The Competition Authority imposed an administrative fine of 40.1 million liras on sahibinden.com and imposed some obligations on the company, on the grounds that it violated the Law on the Protection of Competition with its practices in the real estate and vehicle sales/rental platform services market.According to the announcement on the Competition Authority’s website, the investigation regarding the prevention of data portability in terms of real estate and vehicle sales/rental platform services and the determination of whether the relevant article of the Law has been violated through other means has been completed.
In the investigation, it was determined that sahibinden.com, which was found to be dominant in the real estate sales/rental and vehicle sales platform services market, made it difficult for its corporate members in the real estate and vehicle categories (real estate agents and dealers) to use more than one platform by preventing them from moving their ads to other listing platforms. It was judged that the competitors were in a nature to complicate their activities.
An administrative fine of 40 million 150 thousand 533 liras was imposed on sahibinden.com for these actions, which are in violation of the relevant article of the Law.
Data on sahibinden.com can be moved to other platforms
In addition to the administrative fine, some obligations have been imposed on sahibinden.com in order to end the said violation and to ensure effective competition in the market.
With the decision, sahibinden.com will have to abolish the provisions in the contracts it has signed with its corporate members in the real estate and vehicle categories that prevent the members from transferring their posting data to other platforms.
In addition, sahibinden.com will provide the infrastructure that will enable advertisers to effectively transfer their data on real estate and vehicle ads to competing platforms and keep their data on these ads up-to-date, without any charge.
According to the information obtained, after posting an ad once on sahibinden.com or any other platform, advertisers can refrain from posting the same ad on other platforms.
When the price of real estate or vehicle advertisements needs to be changed, this change has to be made separately on all advertisement sites. This prevents the advertisers who log in to sahibinden.com from posting on other platforms and makes it difficult for competing sites to enter the market.
The decision will enable real estate agents and gallery owners to easily carry the advertisements they post on sahibinden.com to other advertisement platforms they are members of, and when changes are made in data such as the price of the advertisement on this platform, these changes will also be reflected in their advertisements on other platforms.
In addition to the transfer of data to other platforms via sahibinden.com, the Board also paved the way for those who enter ads from competing platforms to transfer their data to sahibinden.com.
According to the decision, if the real estate agents and gallery owners who have memberships on competing platforms other than sahibinden.com, want to move their advertisements on these platforms to sahibinden.com, and if the competing platforms accept this request, sahibinden.com will enable them to move and keep the data of the said members up to date. It will need to install the infrastructure without delay, as soon as reasonably possible, and at no cost.
The implementation of these compliance measures by sahibinden.com will be monitored annually by the Competition Board for three years from the date of first implementation.
On the other hand, the Board considers that the undertaking does not transparently publish doped advertisements, does not act transparently in the application of native advertising, favors itself through the ranking algorithm, and favors/deceives itself in other services it provides (such as real estate/vehicle valuation, referral to an authorized dealer in new vehicle sales, providing expertise) and decided to reject the allegations that he abused his dominant position by limiting competition by these means.
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