On 30th November 2023, the snappily titled National Trading Standards Estate and Letting Agency Team (NTSELAT) made their long-awaiting (and delayed) announcement about the requirements for estate agents to provide upfront “material information” to prospective home buyers.
The full guidance document is available HERE
Part A of the “guidance” (actually, a requirement to comply with an obligation to provide material information on residential property listings) has already been in place for some time and includes information such as council tax, asking price and tenure.
Parts B and C are the new requirements being introduced today, and they take the process a long way forward.
How does this affect surveyors? Well, some of the information required for B and C are, potentially, going to be quite difficult for sellers or estate agents to know. Look at the list below:-
Part B
The physical characteristics of the property
The number and types of rooms
Utilities
Parking
Part C
Building safety
Restrictions and rights
Flood and erosion risk
Planning permission and proposals for development
Property accessibility and adaptations
Coalfield or mining area
Let’s look at some of these in a bit more detail
For example, in B “The physical characteristics of the property” include “materials type/materials used in construction”. These are described as:
“A listing should include an accurate description or statement as to the property’s construction materials/type, where there is a known consideration in the property. A “known consideration” may be, for example, something to do with property materials that knowingly impacts the buyer’s enjoyment of the property, mortgage availability, or the availability of relevant insurance products.”
…and they go on to describe examples such as a thatched roof, prefabricated builds or timber framed windows.
Really? What does this mean? Why would “timber framed windows” represent a “known consideration” as opposed to any other type of window?
And would an estate agent or property owner necessarily know if the property was constructed in such a way that it represented a “known consideration”?
And let’s look at C. They include the statement that “any known building safety issues are material information”.
They give examples such as asbestos and “at-risk wooden decking for external structures (including balconies).”
How many owners or agents would recognise asbestos-containing materials, or the early signs of rot in a timber balcony structure?
Without going into minute detail, what this looks like is the potential for an estate agent to get things spectacularly wrong.
A lot of the information required is not the sort of knowledge that the everyday homeowner or estate agent is likely to have or know how to identify.
But surveyors gather all this information as part of their everyday work. It’s what we do.
So, does this provide us with a great opportunity to work with estate agents to pull this information together to help them meet their legal obligations?
Certainly, it falls outside of the “normal” pattern of the estate agent/surveyor relationship. But does that mean that we cannot seek to develop a new-look relationship? Why could we not look to obtain and deliver this information as part of a trade-off against better promotion of surveys by the agent?
Without doubt the world of surveying is going to change in the coming years. Already the talk is of “upfront information”, and comparisons have been made with other territories where pre-marketing surveys are the norm. Sure, the property markets in Scotland or Norway are very different and not necessarily comparable to that in England and Wales , but it would be negligent of organisations such as the RPSA not to be working with industry stakeholders to see what the possibilities are.
And the first step in this process might just be that conversation with your local estate agents about how we can help them obtain and deliver accurate and complete “material information”.
Alan Milstein
RPSA Chairman
30.11.23
