Rightmove’s decision to encourage estate agents to divulge more information relating to the tenure of a property on listings simply does not go far enough, according to the National Leasehold Campaign (NLC). 
The NLC wrote to the portal yesterday – see letter below – to complain that the lack of information on tenure such as freehold, commonhold or leasehold on listings does not, it claims, comply with the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations.
Under CPR, agents have a duty to divulge anything that might affect a consumer’s transactional decision – which could be simply deciding whether to ask the agent for more information or to request a viewing.
There has been a lot of focus on leaseholds of late because of high service charges and ground rents which can add up over the years and adversely affect future sales.
Open letter to Rightmove
Dear Rightmove,
I am writing to you to raise the lack of Leasehold information contained on your portal. I first raised this issue with you in January 2020. The lack of clear information on properties advertised on your portal continues to breach Consumer Protection Regulations as it fails to display material information that impacts on a consumer transactional decision. Portals are not exempt from this and have both a legal and moral obligation to provide this information.
NLC along with the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership (LKP) have recently met with Property Mark and Trading Standards who do agree this information MUST BE displayed by portals.
In response to my initial complaint raised in January you wrote:
“We believe this is an extremely important topic and it’s vital our agent customers have clear guidance regarding the mandatory information that must be displayed on property listings. We’re in contact with the National Trading Standards Estate and Letting Agency Team who are currently working on a list of material information that must be included in a property listing based on latest guidance available. As soon as we have this, we will review any changes that need to be made and will be communicating with all of our agent customers”
I have seen this article today Rightmove urges agents to provide extra information on all listings. It appears the outcome of your review, which has taken 15 months to carry out to simply include the most basic of basic leasehold information (Leasehold or Freehold). It appears not much has changed since we last raised our concerns which is extremely disappointing.
I will reiterate what I have stated in my previous correspondence As stated in the National Trading Standards Estate Agents ‘Guidance on property sales’, material information also includes the length of any lease (especially if it’s a short lease), Service Charge, Ground rent and any other payments required under the lease.
We urge you to review the lack of leasehold information displayed on your portal. We hope it doesn’t take another 15 months until we see any further changes.
We look forward to your timely response
Katie Kendrick
Founder of the National Leasehold Campaign (NLC)
I’m fully behind this campaign to the extent I modified rummage4 as soon as was practically possible (we had to wait for UPRN) to show how material information can be automatically provided by the portals through existing CRM feeds.
The portals cannot display information that is not in the data feeds from the CRM providers, RMv3 and RMrealtime feeds don’t include all of the material information a prospective buyer has a right to.
With the experience of the practical challenges that the CRM providers and the portals face I know it is going to take time for SAAS providers to include all material information in their feeds and that them has to be done in a way acceptable and standard to them all.
NTSELAT were requested a meeting on this before Christmas. Defining material information is the first part of a standardised solution. Until there is agreement and feeds are modified, the collaboration tied together by a rummage4 showcase demonstrates a working and practical solution that starts with an automatic generation of a complete property file within Reapit, includes key facts for buyers from Sprift, market insight from Dataloft and is fed into Rightmove, Zoopla, On the Market and Boomin as part of the datafeed from Reapit to the portals. (Boomin have been the most accommodating of the portals to accept showcase and display it in a way that’s best suited to the agent’s need)
There are suppliers trying to play catch up on material information, piecing together the elements of a complete property file but they are not considering the competition and variations of systems that will exist between their respective solutions and how their solutions will impact their customers.
Estate agency is a competitive service industry, levelling the playing field with a low barrier to entry might work for wholesale solutions (all services provided by the portals) but that wholesale strategy works in favour of weaker agents very much to the detriment of agents who work hard to be better.
I fully appreciate change doesn’t come easy to this industry but there are properly motivated, experienced people driving change that will benefit agents and consumers. That is going to ruffle feathers but this change is happening. Consumers complaining to the redress schemes about a lack of information they know they’re entitled is the quickest way to weed out the bottom feeders that for too long have dragged the standard of the industry down.
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The larger issue here is the feed providers agents use to upload their listings, the middle men. There are thousands of them, ranging from big providers hosting many agents, down to the bit of software written by a temp several years ago running on the PC in the basement that no one knows about.
When a portal adds a new field, all those feed providers have to do work to support and integrate it, and they usually throw that cost at the agents. Some even have the audacity to charge agents based on how many fields they use which is crazy so some agents state they can add this into the existing description field which isn’t easy to confirm compliance on. So when a portal tries to add a field, hundreds of agents face higher charges which is issue number 1.
Then you have the feed providers that just don’t have the ability to carry out the work. Even some of the larger ones (not going to name), take a minimum of 6 months to even look at your request, some of the small ones can take a couple of years.
Are the above proposing that any feeds that don’t comply immediately just get switched off and can’t list anymore? Generally this is the little independent agents on custom feeds. Removing large chunks of listings from the portals of all the smaller agents doesn’t sound like a win for home hunters or agents to me.
I don’t know what the fix is, other than for agents to use better feed providers that comply quickly, but that will cost agents more money too.
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I have built the solution and have it working. You’ve not hear about it because it challenges the way things work.
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Then do share…
There are many solutions out there, it still doesn’t get over the issue of agents needing to spend more to either integrate it or move to a provider that supports it.
Unless you are offering to go integrate it into the thousands of feed providers for free, in which case, hats off to you.
They should be sending the above letter to all the feed providers. The portals can add new fields really quickly, it is the feed providers that stop them.
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done all that, overcome all of the issues. (This time last year offered to data feed Homesearch)
Only this week I am adding a REX feed to the ones I already have.
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I do agree with this in principal BUT the estate agents should not be held to account if the information is wrong.
Yes they must not mislead people but if the length of lease is out by a couple of years or maintenance is out by £100 as has been increased …. Agents should not be the place for compensation from a disgruntled buyer.
This is the reason many do not currently list details.
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If the agent provides the information, then the agent should be liable for any misrepresentation by said agent. It’s easy to qualify, simply obtain the information, lease from HMLR and service charge etc from the client and say that as at (date of listing) we hold the following information……
Instructing a lawyer before the property goes live would also help as all this information could be checked at the outset. Yes, there would be a charge to the seller from the lawyer if the property didn’t sell but why not? If work has been done, it is chargeable.
I’d sooner put my trust in an agent who actually knew that they were doing rather than one that simply listed a property and told a buyer to go and find out the information direct.
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