Agents urged to report listings on portals without the required information

James Munro
James Munro

The announcement in February that new information, designed to help home movers make informed educated decisions about a property, should be included on all property listings was broadly welcomed by the property industry.

A property’s council tax band or rate and the property price and tenure information – for sales – should new be included on all property listings, with these data fields now appearing on the various portals.

These changes represent the first phase of a project by the National Trading Standards Estate and Letting Agency Team (NTSELAT) in partnership with industry leaders and the UK’s major property portals, to define what constitutes material information for property listings.

Developed in response to estate and letting agents’ requests for clarity on what information should be disclosed as standard when marketing a property, Part A of this three-phase project includes information that is considered material for all properties. A further two phases are being developed, which will incorporate further material information such as restrictive covenants, flood risk and other specific factors that may impact certain properties.*

National Trading Standards wants all material information to be mandatory on property listings once all three phases of the project are complete. At that stage, agents will need to include all the required information before it is listed on a property portal.

James Munro, head of NTSELAT, told Paul Offley, compliance officer at The Guild of Property Professionals, that the time was right to make the recent changes regarding the disclosure of material information.

Munro said: “If you go back a number of years, you will recall the Property Misdescriptions Act, which was an attempt to regulate property descriptions in property advertising and listing.

Paul Offley
Paul Offley

“While it was a well written piece of legislation with a schedule that effectively listed what we are talking about today, however, the biggest drawback was that the act said ‘if’ you make a statement about the following particulars that is false or misleading you are committing an offence. The key word being ‘if’, because if you didn’t make a reference to those points, you couldn’t fall foul of the law. I think this led to a situation where agents weren’t disclosing information because they didn’t want to fall foul of the act. I believe this created a culture change, as well as an uneasy relationship between agents and conveyancers.”

Munro continued: “The Consumer Protection from unfair trading regulations came in during 2008 and these transformed the whole regulation of business within the UK. They replaced the Trade Descriptions Act, and shortly after they replaced the Property Misdescriptions Act. While these Regulations are wide ranging, the biggest challenge with them is that they don’t specifically mandate disclosure of information. They do introduce the concept of material information, which is the information an average person needs to make a transactional decision. This involves doing anything to do with that transaction, from picking up the phone or emailing, right through down the line prior to the contract and after the contract. It is the prior to the contract element that is important here, where the Regulations say that if you fail to disclose material information you commit an offence.”

Munro explained that where this caused issues is property agents do not know what material information they were required to provide because there was no list. Housing is also probably one of the most difficult things to market and define because every property will have something that is relevant to people’s transactional decision, such as restricted covenants that will legally restrict what can be done to a property.

“It is no good finding out information after you have had a survey commissioned or have your mortgage in place, especially if that information would have been detrimental to your decision,” he commented. “The changes are about avoiding that, and about shifting the culture within the property sector.”

Offley says that new material information disclosure guidance is split into three parts, with part A specifically mentioning property portal listings and properties listed on agent’s websites.

“Yes,” said Munro, “part A is non-optional information, which is information that will have a direct financial implication for people. We took the view that most people start their journey on the property portals and then would be referred through to an agent. The same software that drives the content on the portal, also essentially drives the content the agent’s websites. Starting with the portals and making sure they are the enablers of this information and have the structures in place to display this required information was key. The onus for sourcing and adding it to the system clearly rests with the agent, however, the software needed to be changed to ensure the information could be displayed.”

How will this be regulated? Munro explained: “To a large degree it will be self-regulated by the portals. The hope is that in time, portals will refuse to add properties to their sites if they do not contain the required material information. It will take some time, as this is a huge culture shift and asking people to change their systems this quickly will be challenging.

“We are hoping, in the short-term, where there a listing that does not have the required information there will be a warning highlighting the fact that the information is missing and needs to be added. In the long-term, the hope is that the portals will not host the listings at all if it doesn’t meet the information requirements. Also, we are encouraging agents to report listings without the required information to either us or the portal so that action can be taken. The portals have a responsibility to display accurate information, and where something is brought to their attention, they are expected to take action.”

 

New material information rules – your questions answered

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7 Comments

  1. EAMD172

    Interestingly I am just dealing with a complaint where the owner of the property has supplied us with incorrect information regarding the annual maintenance fees. We supplied this information on all details and marketing in good faith and a buyer then started to proceed with the purchase and withdrew some weeks later once he established that the maintenance charges were incorrect. For two weeks now I have been trying to ascertain from the managing agent and the sellers solicitor what the maintenance charges were having sent 10 emails and made various phone calls I am getting nowhere. To what length should we go to check the information supplied by the owner? Managing  Agents charge for the information and time. We can check the lease by asking the owners for a copy but not the maintenance charges. If this case goes against us where does it leave agents?

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    1. Robert_May

      To what length should you go?…. far enough to prevent  your agency being on the wrong side of a redress claim or prosecution.

      to make the maths easy to follow, if there are 1million sales a year,  2 million homes are listed, that means  20 million viewings and 100 million consumers who are  have an interest in the homes listed. Some applicants will look at 1 property, others will look at loads [the number of consumers is hard to gauge] The result and reality is there a will be 50 bespoke sets of decision influencing information on every home listed. CPR has made agents responsible for a huge data collating exercise and because of that agents either have to do a lot of the work that has been  previously done post sales memorandum or they need the client to engage their conveyancer much earlier in the sales process; on instruction and before the property becomes of possible interest to applicants who might  be tragically disadvantaged that the bins are collected on Friday- (if they’d known that they wouldn’t have viewed the property-  angry face emoticon, angry face emoticon)

       

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    2. revilo

      How about asking for a copy of the Maintenance / Service Charge bill? Perfectly reasonable!

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  2. GrumpyFormerEA

    So where do Purple Bricks stand with this, the majority of adverts written by the vendor and for want of a better word most are a load of Tosh.

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  3. localagent735

    i have tried to report other agents for blatant lies or no EPC’s etc on details and just get told by Rightmove and the property ombudsman that it has to be reported to the company first. no accountability at all.

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  4. Woodentop

    Blimey agents will be wasting most of their day reporting this stuff …. non-disclosure has been an on-going problem with some for over a decade and continues to this day.

     

    QUESTION:  If National Trading Standards wants all material information to be on property listings, why don’t they check themselves … its all there not to be seen 24/7. Why should agents have to police for free, on their behalf while they are being paid to sit and wait.

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    1. Rob Hailstone

      It is the same with law firms who are part of the Conveyancing Quality Scheme (CQS), they should report breaches. Many want to, but don’t like grassing up their competitors, no matter how bad they are.

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