A Federal Court judge had put off concerns that consumers could be tricked by a marketing campaign claiming Fairfax Media had the highest-rated property app.
Justice Bernard Murphy of the Federal Court in Melbourne stated that it is relatively easy to settle a dispute between Domain and its competitor by appointing an entity that can count the data. The matter started four weeks ago when REA Group filed against Fairfax Media, proprietor of Domain Group. The two companies also own competing newspapers.
Fairfax agreed with the termination of the dispute by stopping the use of three phrases that REA Group claimed was misleading to consumers and real estate agents. However, William Houghton QC of REA Group sought another court order this week and forced Domain to pull down billboards calling it the highest rated app, Herald Sun reported.
Justice Murphy denied this request because the case was weak. He stated that he did not see any great problem in claiming to be rated number one based solely upon Google. The first application stopped Domain from claiming to be the number one property app in Australia in their marketing material.
However this week, evidence emerged proving the groups' figures for the most number of listings were based on different internal counting and collection procedures. For example, REA's data included listings for apartments and group houses, while Domain was only counting existing properties.
Fairfax opted for an adjournment on Tuesday after receiving the updated data from REA, leading Justice Murphy to note that it was an argument which should have not happened in the first place, The Australian reported.
Under cross examination by Timothy McEvoy, it was discovered that REA had published inaccurate information to agents through their Fast Facts documents. For example, in October of last year, REA claimed there were 15,650,000 accesses to its app. This was revised to 15,570,000 accesses for the court documents.
