Estate agency website + Material Information checklist (NTSELAT, 2026)

This is the checklist I run when building or rebuilding a website for a UK estate or letting agent. It is built around one duty that has teeth: you are the trader, and if a listing leaves out information a buyer or renter needs to make an informed decision, that omission can be an unfair commercial practice. The website is where most of that information now lives, so the website is where most of the risk sits. Get the listing template right and you remove a whole category of trouble before a single property goes live.

The checklist is opinionated, and it is honest about a moving target. The well-known NTSELAT "Material Information" guidance, Parts A, B and C, was withdrawn in May 2025 when the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force and repealed the old CPRs. The substance of what you must disclose has not gone away; the named framework is being reconsulted on. So I treat Parts A/B/C as the best available map of what "material" means, I name the primary sources, and I tell you to check them yourself before you rely on a precise field list. I do not invent statutory subsections, and neither should anyone selling you a "compliance" plugin.

01The checklist at a glance

02Material Information, Parts A, B and C

"Material Information" is the property industry's shorthand for everything a buyer or renter needs to know to make an informed decision about a property. The framework most agents know, three parts, A, B and C, came from the National Trading Standards Estate and Letting Agency Team (NTSELAT), developed with the portals and steering-group members.

2.1 Part A, applies to every property

Part A is the baseline that should appear on every listing, regardless of property type. Broadly it covers the price (a real figure, not a range standing in for a price), the tenure (freehold, leasehold, share of freehold, commonhold), and the council tax band, or for lettings, the council tax band / rate. These are the items there is no excuse to omit, and they are the ones I make mandatory fields in any listing CMS.

2.2 Part B, additional standard information

Part B is information that should be established and shown for the great majority of properties: the property type and construction, the number and type of rooms, and practical living facts, utilities (water, electricity, gas, sewerage), heating, broadband and mobile coverage, parking, and building-safety considerations where they are relevant. This is the bulk of a thorough listing, and it is where a thin "call us for details" listing falls short.

2.3 Part C, information that may or may not apply

Part C is information that only matters if the property is actually affected: things like flood or coastal-erosion risk, planning permissions and proposals nearby, restrictions and restrictive covenants, rights and easements, and other property-specific issues. The key discipline here is that you check, rather than assume. Where an item is material, asking the seller is not enough on its own, you are expected to verify against official sources.

I am deliberately not reproducing an exhaustive field-by-field list of A, B and C in this guide. The lists have changed, and they are under review. The named NTSELAT / Property Ombudsman sources in Section 08 carry the full, current detail, read them, do not trust a summary (including this one) as the last word.

03The legal backdrop, CPRs and the DMCC Act 2024

You do not need to be a lawyer to run a compliant website, but you do need to understand who is on the hook and for what. The short version: the agency is the "trader", and leaving out information a consumer needs can be a misleading omission.

3.1 The CPRs, the old foundation

For years the relevant law was the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (the "CPRs"). These prohibited misleading actions and misleading omissions in dealings with consumers, and they are why "material information" became the property industry's working concept in the first place. As of April 2025 the CPRs were repealed, but the principles they established are the ones the new regime carries forward, so they remain useful context.

3.2 The DMCC Act 2024, the current regime

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (the "DMCC Act") brought the unfair-commercial-practices rules into force on 6 April 2025, replacing the CPRs. It keeps the core duty: a practice can be unfair if it is a misleading omission, leaving out, hiding, or obscuring information the average consumer needs to make an informed decision. Enforcement moved towards the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which gained stronger direct powers under the Act. I am not going to quote precise penalty figures or section numbers in a printed guide that has to age well, the gov.uk and legislation.gov.uk sources in Section 08 are where you read the exact wording.

3.3 What this means for your website, in plain terms

• The agency is the trader. The portal is a channel; the duty sits with you.
• Omission counts, not just lies. Failing to disclose a material fact can be as much a problem as stating something false.
• The listing is the front line. Most material information now reaches the consumer through the listing on your site and the portals, which is exactly why the template (Section 04) matters.
• Hedge in copy, verify in process. Where you are unsure whether something is material, the safe move is to find out and disclose, not to leave it off.

This is compliance-adjacent territory. Use this guide to get the website mechanics right; take the legal position from the primary sources and, where the stakes are high, your own professional advice.

04Listing template fields your website must carry

This is the part whoever builds the site actually controls. Whatever the regulator calls the fields, your CMS has to be able to hold them, one structured field per item, not a free-text blob where things get forgotten. A listing template that cannot carry council tax band or lease length is a template that forces non-compliance.

4.1 Mandatory fields, the Part A baseline

Every listing record needs dedicated, required fields for:

4.2 Conditional fields, Part B and Part C

Build these as fields that appear when relevant, so a negotiator is prompted rather than relying on memory:

• Leasehold detail, lease length remaining, service charge, ground rent, managing agent.
• Utilities and connectivity, water, electricity, gas, sewerage, heating type, broadband, mobile coverage.
• Parking, type and number of spaces, allocated or not.
• Construction and building safety, non-standard construction notes, cladding / building-safety status where it applies.
• Part C risks, flood / erosion risk, restrictive covenants, rights of way and easements, relevant planning matters.

4.3 Listing status and freshness

A listing carries state, and the state is itself material:

• Status, available, under offer, sold STC, let agreed, withdrawn.
• Last updated, a visible date so a stale listing is obvious.
• Removed cleanly, when a property is gone, the page is updated or properly redirected, not left lying as a phantom listing.

4.4 Make required fields actually required

A field that can be left blank will be left blank under deadline. For the Part A items, I make the CMS refuse to publish until they are filled. That single piece of engineering removes the most common and most avoidable omissions before they ever reach a buyer.

05Valuation + enquiry forms, lawful and EU-sovereign

Valuation requests and property enquiries are where your site collects personal data, name, address, phone, email, sometimes financial situation. That makes the forms a UK-GDPR matter, not just a lead-gen detail.

5.1 Collect only what you need

A valuation form needs enough to call the person back and find the property. It does not need their date of birth, their income, or a marketing opt-in pre-ticked. Data minimisation is both the law and good manners, and a shorter form converts better anyway.

5.2 Lawful basis and a linked privacy notice

Each form states why you are collecting the data and links to a privacy notice that explains: what you collect, the lawful basis (consent for marketing; legitimate interests or steps towards a contract for an enquiry), how long you keep it, who else sees it, and how someone exercises their rights. Marketing consent is a separate, unticked checkbox, never bundled into "submit".

5.3 Store the data in the UK or EU/EEA

Where the form data lands matters. I default to UK or EU/EEA-hosted form and storage tooling so visitor and lead data does not get relayed to a non-adequate jurisdiction by default. "It works in the EU" is not the same as "it is pinned to the EU", the data-processing terms are where you confirm it, not the marketing page.

5.4 Spam protection without a tracking pixel

Forms get bot traffic, so they need protection, but I do not solve it with a reCAPTCHA that doubles as a US behavioural tracker on a page collecting someone's home address. A privacy-friendly challenge such as Cloudflare Turnstile does the job without turning the valuation form into a data-export.

06Structured data the portals expect

Structured data is a small block of machine-readable markup (schema.org) that describes the listing to search engines and aggregators in a format they can trust. It does not replace the visible listing, it mirrors it, and it helps your properties be understood and, sometimes, shown more richly in search.

6.1 The types worth using

For property listings the relevant schema.org types are broadly:

• RealEstateListing, the listing itself: the advert for a specific property at a point in time.
• Residence (and its subtypes such as SingleFamilyResidence, Apartment), the property as a place.
• Offer, the price and availability attached to the listing.

I am describing what these help with, not inventing exact property names, schema.org's own type pages (Section 08) are the authority for which fields exist and what they are called. Use the real field names from there, not a guess.

6.2 What it helps with

• Understanding. It hands a search engine the price, location, and property type as data, not as text it has to infer.
• Eligibility for richer results. Correct markup is a precondition for any enhanced listing presentation a search engine chooses to show.
• Consistency. It forces the listing's key facts into a structured shape, which surfaces gaps in your own data.

6.3 The markup must match the page

The single rule that matters: structured data must reflect what the visitor sees. Marking up a price or a tenure that is not on the visible page, or that contradicts it, is exactly the kind of misleading-by-machine that gets a site demoted by search engines and undercuts the honesty the law expects. Mirror the listing; never embellish it.

07What I do NOT do, the anti-checklist

A few opinionated negatives. These are positions I take when building the agency's website.

• I do not hide material information below the fold. Price, tenure and council tax band go where a buyer sees them without hunting, not buried at the bottom, not locked inside a downloadable PDF that never loads on a phone. If it is material, it is visible.
• I do not use "available on request" as a dodge for required fields. "Call us for the tenure" is not disclosure. The Part A items live on the listing. "On request" is for genuinely optional extras, never for the baseline a consumer needs.
• I do not put valuation forms on US-hosted tooling by default. A form collecting someone's home address and phone number should not relay that to a non-adequate jurisdiction because the form builder was the convenient one. UK/EU-sovereign storage, pinned in the data-processing terms.
• I do not let the structured data say more than the page. No marked-up price the visitor cannot see, no schema claiming a feature the listing does not. The machine-readable version is a mirror of the human one, full stop.
• I do not sell "DMCC compliance" as a plugin. No piece of website software makes you compliant; it makes the right disclosures possible. The duty is yours, the process is yours, and the legal detail comes from the primary sources, not from me, and not from a checkout add-on.

08Sources + further reading

• NTSELAT, Material Information for property listings (status page; guidance withdrawn May 2025, replacement under review) · nationaltradingstandards.uk
• The Property Ombudsman, Material Information in property listings (sales and lettings guides) · tpos.co.uk
• The Property Institute (formerly TPI), Material Information and DMCC Act resources · tpi.org.uk
• GOV.UK, Competition and Markets Authority (DMCC Act, unfair commercial practices) · gov.uk/government/organisations/competition-and-markets-authority
• CMA, Unfair commercial practices guidance (CMA207) · gov.uk/government/publications/unfair-commercial-practices-cma207
• legislation.gov.uk, Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 · legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/contents
• legislation.gov.uk, Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (repealed; historical context) · legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/contents
• Chartered Trading Standards Institute / Business Companion, trader guidance on consumer law · businesscompanion.info
• schema.org, RealEstateListing type reference · schema.org/RealEstateListing
• schema.org, Residence type reference · schema.org/Residence
• schema.org, Offer type reference · schema.org/Offer
• ICO, Guide to the UK GDPR (lawful basis, privacy notices, data minimisation) · ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/

A note on the long-form version

This is the v1.0 edition. The long-form version (planned for late 2026) will include worked examples, a real listing template field map, the valuation-form setup I ship with EU-sovereign storage, and a RealEstateListing schema block built from the live schema.org fields. It will also track wherever the post-DMCC Material Information guidance lands once the consultation reports. If you want to be told when it ships, message us at ukwebmarketing.com and you will reach the people who wrote this.