Property News
Material information: what has to be on a listing, and who gets fined when it isn't
19 September 2026 · 3 min read
Material information is the clearest example in our industry of a rule that everybody has heard of and very few offices have actually worked through. It is not a portal preference and it is not best practice. It comes from the National Trading Standards Estate and Letting Agency Team's guidance read alongside the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations, and the effect of the two together is that omitting information an average consumer would need in order to make an informed decision is an unfair commercial practice.
The guidance splits into three parts, and the split matters because the parts behave differently.
“Enforcement is against the agent, not the seller. That is the part most offices have not internalised.”
Part A is the set most agents already treat as mandatory, because the portals reject listings without it: price, tenure, council tax band, and an EPC. If your listing is missing one of those it usually will not go live, so the enforcement is effectively automatic and most offices are already compliant without thinking about it.
Part B applies to every single property without exception. Physical characteristics: the type of construction, how the property is heated, what the drainage arrangement is, what the water supply is, broadband availability, mobile signal, parking. Every house has drainage whether or not anybody wrote it down, so on Part B a blank field simply means missing information. There is no property to which these questions do not apply.
Part C is the one that catches people, and it catches them because of a subtlety in what a blank means. Part C covers the things that apply to some properties and not others: restrictive covenants, rights of way, whether the property has ever flooded, whether it is in a flood risk area, whether there is or has been Japanese knotweed, whether it has been underpinned, whether there are any planning applications nearby that would affect it. Most houses have none of these. For those houses the correct advertised answer is none, not silence.
So a blank on Part C has to be able to mean two completely different things, and getting the distinction wrong is the entire risk. If you treat unchecked as none, you advertise a house on a flood plain as dry. If you treat a checked none as unknown, you make a perfectly clean house look like it is hiding something and you slow your own sale down. The only workable answer is to record explicitly which items somebody has actually asked the seller about, separately from what the answer was.
Two practical points follow from that.
The first is that this is a data problem before it is a compliance problem. If your listing information lives in a Word document, a portal form and somebody's memory, you cannot reliably say which questions were asked, when, or of whom. The office cannot prove it did the work even when it did.
The second is about who carries the risk. Trading Standards enforce against the agent, not against the seller. A seller who did not mention the covenant has not committed the offence; the agent who advertised the property without it has. That is the part most offices have not fully internalised, and it is why getting a signed record of what the seller told you is worth the five minutes it takes.
None of this is unusually hard. It is a checklist, asked once, recorded properly, and carried onto every surface the property appears on. What makes it painful is doing it three times in three systems, which is the actual reason it gets skipped.