Material Information: What Must Now Be on the Listing

National Trading Standards guidance on material information changed what a property advert has to contain before anyone enquires. It is phased into parts, and the direction of travel is that anything capable of affecting a decision belongs on the advert rather than in a conversation later. Agents still treating particulars as marketing copy are the ones getting caught.

What material information means

The underlying obligation comes from consumer protection law, which prohibits misleading actions and misleading omissions. Material information is simply information the average consumer needs to make an informed decision.

An omission counts. Leaving out a fact that would have changed someone's mind is treated in the same frame as stating something untrue, which is a shift in mindset for anyone trained to write particulars as advertising.

Part A covers what every listing needs regardless of property type: council tax band or rate, price, and tenure. These are the ones with no excuse for being absent.

Part B covers what most properties need — utilities, broadband and mobile coverage, parking, heating type, and the building's construction where relevant.

The three parts in practice

Part C covers things that only affect some properties but affect them a great deal: flood risk, restrictive covenants, planning permissions, coastal erosion, mining, and anything unusual about access or rights of way.

Scotland runs a separate regime with the Home Report, and Northern Ireland differs again. Guidance written for England and Wales does not transfer wholesale.

The portals have built fields for much of this, which is useful and also a trap — a blank field is now visibly blank, and a wrong entry is a documented wrong entry.

Get the information from the seller in writing at instruction, using a property information form, rather than assembling it under time pressure when a buyer asks.

How to actually comply

Where a fact is genuinely unknown, say it is unknown rather than leaving it blank or guessing. "Tenure to be confirmed by the seller's solicitor" is a legitimate answer; silence is not.

The same obligations reach your video and your social posts. A reel that shows a property without disclosing that access is over a private unadopted road is the same omission as a written one.

Your redress scheme and local Trading Standards are the authorities that matter here. The guidance is public, it is readable in an afternoon, and it is regularly updated.