Tesco is considering a push into Britain’s property market by launching a fully fledged online estate agency.

The news comes a fortnight after Tesco suspended an online property marketplace on the advice of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).

Under the service, customers paid Tesco a flat fee of £199 to advertise their home as being “for sale” on a website run by the supermarket. Tesco claimed that more than 250,000 visitors had visited the website in its first two weeks after it was launched at the end of June.

However, sponsors such as Spicerhaart, the leading estate agency, pulled their listings amid fears that they would be undercut by the supermarket group and lose business.

Estate agencies also complained to the OFT that Tesco was itself acting as an estate agent and should abide by the same rules. These include checking descriptions of homes put on the website. In addition, they claimed that people using the service could end up paying twice, involving a fee to Tesco and another to their existing estate agent.

Tesco offered a full refund of the £199 fee to customers when it suspended the service last month.

However, a Tesco spokeswoman said yesterday that rather than turning its back on the property market, the supermarket was reviewing its options “with a view to launching a new and exciting online estate agency service”. She added: “This would enable us to offer our customers personal advice on the sale of their home.”

Asda became the first supermarket to take on estate agents when it launched an instore homeselling scheme in the North East last year. Under the scheme, Homes@Supermarkets, a separate Northumberland-based company, featured touchscreen terminals in 20 Asda stores. Asda set the commission at 1 per cent and offered to provide customers with home information packs free-of-charge. It is understood that Asda is reviewing whether to roll the pilot scheme out to other areas of England and Wales.

In recent years, a number of specialist property websites have sprung up offering help on selling a home without going through an estate agent.

An OFT spokesman said: “Our advice to Tesco was that they were engaged in estate agency work.

“If companies are to do that, they need to abide with all the laws relating to estate agency.”

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