National Trading Standards Material Information

On the 30th November 2023, National Trading Standards announced parts b and c of material information for property listings with comprehensive new guidance for sales and letting agents.

Representing the culmination of a programme of work led by the National Trading Standards Estate and Letting Agency Team (NTSELAT) alongside industry leaders and the UK’s major property portals, including our founder member OnTheMarket, the guidance has been developed in response to agents’ calls for clarity on what constitutes material information.

Part B is information that should be covered for all properties – such as the type of property, the building materials used, the number of rooms and information about utilities and parking. Part C is information that only needs to be established if the property is affected by the issue – such as flood risk or restrictive covenants. Part A which has been in place since 2022 includes council tax band, property price, and tenure information.

Agents are already obliged under the Consumer Protection Regulations not to omit any material information on property listings so we’re delighted to see this level of clarity on the upfront information required. We are recommending that all estate agents, seller facing software, and property pack providers adopt our open data standards to provide this data in a digital format and enable the trusted provenance of the data to be shared across transaction participants. 

Sellers are also advised to instruct their conveyancer on or before listing to help ensure validated information is available to the agent for marketing and so that any complex areas such as lease restrictions or boundaries are addressed at an early stage. This will help improve the buyer and mortgage lending journey reulting in lower fall throughs and less delays. 

Our developer community are mapping parts B and C to the existing open property data standards and will create any new data fields we need – watch this space for the update to v2.4 on our GitHub repository.

If you are an estate agent, CRM provider, conveyancing firm, or anyone else working with upfront information and would like a walk through of the schema and how to implement the standards, we’re here to help!