Material information: giving it a home on your listings

"Material information" is the phrase for the facts a buyer or renter needs before they decide whether a property is worth their time. The principle has not changed and is not going to: those facts belong on the listing, not at the far end of a conveyancing process. What changed is the paperwork behind it, and the practical consequence is that the decision about what to show is now yours to make and yours to defend. Here is what that means for your website.

Two duties, not one

The Act works in two ways, and the difference matters when you are deciding what a template must always show. The general duty asks whether you have omitted information the average consumer needs to take an informed transactional decision, and it bites only where the omission would likely have changed what they did. On a priced listing a second and stricter duty applies: the Act names a short list of things that must be there unless the context already makes them obvious, and there is no argument available about whether anyone would have minded. The companion piece sets both out properly.

The categories, simply put

The withdrawn guidance grouped things roughly as below. There is no longer an official checklist and these categories are no longer a defence, but they remain the most defensible working answer available while the sector waits for the government's guidance, and they are still what the portals ask you for. What has changed is that you are now the one deciding they are enough:

• The basics: the price, the tenure, the council tax band or rate, and for leasehold the lease length, service charge and ground rent. In lettings the equivalent is the rent, the deposit and the council tax
• Property-specific essentials: construction materials and property type, utilities, broadband and mobile coverage, parking and heating
• Anything that could materially affect the decision: flood risk, building safety, known structural issues, rights and easements, accessibility and adaptations, restrictions and similar matters

Material information is not extra admin. It is the facts a buyer needs, shown up front instead of unearthed later.

The details that are not about the property

Here is the part that belongs in an article about websites rather than an article about law. Several items on that short list have nothing to do with bricks: who you are, the name you trade under, your business address, your service address if it differs, a business email address, a total price covering anything the buyer will necessarily have to pay, and, where what you actually do about payment, delivery, performance or complaints differs from what you publish, the practice you are operating. These are not judgement calls, and they are visible to anyone who looks at your site without a single member of the public having to complain first. They are also template decisions rather than admin ones, which is exactly why they belong here.

Why it lands on your website

Filling in the portal fields is necessary and it is no longer sufficient. The Act's list includes things a portal never asks you for, and it applies to your own website exactly as it applies to a portal listing, which makes your site the place this has to be got right rather than the place it gets repeated. A listing layout with a clear, consistent home for the information will not make you compliant by itself, because no template can do that, but it turns the disclosure into a structural decision rather than a memory test. Buyers respect an agent who tells them the whole story rather than one who hopes they will not ask.

Make it structural, not manual

The safe approach is a listing template with a dedicated, always-present section for these facts, so nobody has to remember to add them by hand on a busy day. Build the requirement into the template and disclosure becomes the default rather than a checklist somebody might forget under pressure. That is very much a website design decision, not just an admin one.

Why this is worth doing now

There is a specific reason this matters this year rather than in the abstract. The government committed in June 2026 to publish material information guidance later in the year, and it has turned down the case for a phase-in, on the basis that guidance clarifying an existing legal duty should be had regard to as soon as it is published. An agency whose listing template already has a permanent home for these fields will change one template. An agency without one will re-edit every live listing by hand, with no grace period while they do it. Pages and fields that are simple to update are worth their weight, in the same way that keeping your privacy pages current is.

Material information is not a burden to resent. It is the honest baseline buyers expect and the Act requires, with heavier consequences behind it than the old checklist ever carried. Build a listing template with a clear home for it, keep it accurate, and the obligation turns into a trust advantage. We build listing pages with exactly that in mind, and a free site review will flag where yours could be clearer.