If you've been half-watching the noise about upfront information and hoping it settles down before you have to do anything about it, here's the uncomfortable bit: most of it already applies to you. Not "coming in a future consultation". Now.
The part that's still coming — mandatory sales packs — is the headline. But the duty to give buyers the material facts before they view or offer is already sitting in the DMCC Act and in Trading Standards' guidance, and it's already the thing that gets agents in trouble.
So let's separate what's law today from what's on the way, and then talk about the practical problem: actually assembling the stuff.
What already applies
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act took over from the old Consumer Protection Regulations as the framework for unfair trading. In plain terms: if you leave out information a buyer would have wanted before making a decision, that's an omission, and omissions are actionable. It doesn't matter that you didn't lie. Silence counts.
Trading Standards (NTSELAT) turned that principle into a checklist agents can actually work from, split into three parts:
- Part A — the basics that must be on every listing: council tax band, asking price, and tenure. No exceptions, no "TBC".
- Part B — the things every property has, so every listing needs them: property type, construction, number and type of rooms, utilities, parking, accessibility.
- Part C — the things that only affect some properties, but are dealbreakers when they apply: flood risk, restrictive covenants, rights of way, listed status, conservation areas, mining, cladding and building-safety issues.
Part C is where agents get caught. Not because anyone's hiding anything — because nobody checked. A property is in a conservation area, the seller never mentioned it because they didn't think of it as a restriction, and the buyer discovers it eight weeks in when their architect explains that the windows can't be replaced with uPVC.
What's coming
The government's home buying and selling reform is aiming at mandatory upfront information packs — the seller's pack assembled before the property goes on the market, not scrambled together after an offer. The stated goal is fewer fall-throughs and faster completions, and the evidence behind it is uncomplicated: transactions collapse because bad news arrives late.
Nobody should pretend the exact shape and date are settled. What is safe to plan for is the direction of travel. It has been consistent for years and it only points one way: more disclosure, earlier.
Why this is worth doing before you're forced to
Here's the argument that has nothing to do with compliance.
Roughly a third of agreed sales in England and Wales fall through. Not because the buyer changed their mind on a whim — usually because something surfaced during conveyancing that nobody knew about at the offer stage. A flood-risk designation. A short lease. A service charge nobody mentioned. Cladding.
Every one of those facts existed on the day the property was listed. The only variable was when the buyer found out. Find it in week one and you re-price, re-position, or find a buyer who doesn't care. Find it in week nine and you've lost the buyer, the chain, and ten weeks of your team's time.
The pack isn't paperwork. It's the cheapest insurance you can buy against a fall-through.
And it sells. A buyer who gets a complete pack with the listing behaves differently to one who gets a floorplan and a "call for details". They arrive at the viewing already half-committed, and they offer with fewer conditions, because they've had their questions answered before they had to ask them.
The actual problem: assembling it
None of this is intellectually hard. It's just tedious, and it's spread across a dozen places.
The EPC is on the government register. Tenure and the last sale price are with HM Land Registry. Flood risk is with the Environment Agency. Conservation areas and listed buildings sit with the local authority and Historic England. Coal mining is with the Coal Authority. Broadband and mobile coverage are Ofcom's. Council tax is the VOA's. And then a whole set of things — ground rent, service charge, disputes, alterations, what's actually included in the sale — only the seller knows, and getting a straight answer out of a seller by email is its own small career.
Do that properly and it's a couple of hours per property. Multiply by your stock. That's why it doesn't get done, and that's the honest reason Part C gets skipped.
The pack builds itself, mostly
Type a postcode, pick the address, and PropFind pulls what's on public record straight away — EPC, tenure and sale history from Land Registry, flood risk, conservation and listed status, mining, broadband. That part is free and automatic.
Whatever the registers can't answer, a wizard walks you through one question at a time, with a plain-English note on why a buyer needs it. Anything only the seller knows gets sent to them by a single link — they fill it in on their phone, and it drops straight back into the pack.
Out comes a branded PDF in your colours, with every fact tagged for where it came from: official register, seller declared, or agent verified. Nothing is invented — anything still unknown says so, plainly.
Where the honest limits are
Be clear-eyed about what a pack is and isn't.
It doesn't replace the conveyancer. The official copies of the title register, the local authority searches, the drainage and water search — those are legal work, they cost money, and they come from the solicitor. A good pack shows those as in progress, with a date, rather than pretending they're done.
It doesn't replace a survey either. And it should never guess. If nobody knows whether the boiler was serviced, the pack says "to be supplied" — it doesn't quietly write "yes".
That's the whole discipline, really: say what you know, say where you got it, and be visibly honest about what's still open. A buyer trusts a pack with six unknowns clearly marked far more than one that reads suspiciously complete.
Where to start
Don't try to retrofit your whole stock. Take the next property you're instructed on and build the pack before it goes live. You'll find out two things quickly: how much of it fills itself in from public data, and which questions your sellers actually stumble on.
Then look at what it changed. Fewer "can you just check…" emails. Fewer surprises at week nine. And a listing that answers the buyer's questions before they've worked out how to ask them.