Starting an estate agency: your website is a regulated document

Most people starting an agency work through the list in the order it feels: company, bank account, branding, website, portals, first instruction. The website turns up fourth, somewhere between the logo and the business cards, as a thing to be made nice.

It is not a nice thing. It is a regulated document, and several duties that apply to a new agency can only be discharged on it. You can be properly registered, properly insured and a member of everything, and still be breaking the law through your own homepage.

This is a plain-English list of what has to be on an England agency website on day one, what is coming, and the one area where there is currently no official answer at all. It is general information and not legal advice, and some of it moves: check anything load-bearing before you rely on it.

The order nobody tells you about

Start with the thing that reorders the whole list. Your website has to be right before the portals will take you, not after.

Rightmove's published requirement is short: "To join Rightmove as an agent, you must be a registered company and a member of a Redress Scheme." Zoopla's member criteria go further. You must maintain redress registration with TPO or the Property Redress Scheme. You must "operate an established and professional business with a physical business address (no PO boxes/shared offices)". And your trading names, logos and addresses must be consistent across your Zoopla account, your Companies House registration, and your own website, branch and promotional material.

Read that last condition again. It is a consistency test across three places at once. A trading name on the site that does not match the registered entity, or a logo you have quietly redesigned on the website only, is an onboarding problem before it is anything else. Zoopla also wants a contactable landline answering the majority of calls, which catches more new agencies than you would think.

OnTheMarket publishes no joining criteria at all: no redress requirement, no trading history rule, nothing. You will have to ask them. The one thing you can stop worrying about is the old One Other Portal rule, which OnTheMarket dropped for agents entering new listing agreements back in January 2018.

What the law requires on the site itself

### Company identity, on every page

Two sets of rules overlap here and most new sites satisfy neither properly.

Regulation 24(2) of the Company, Limited Liability Partnership and Business (Names and Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2015 requires a company to disclose its registered name on its websites. Regulation 25 adds the part of the United Kingdom in which it is registered, its registered number and the address of its registered office. The registered name, note, not only your trading name. These replaced the Companies (Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2008, which were revoked on 31 January 2015 and which a surprising amount of online guidance still cites.

The Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 add more, and set a higher bar for where it lives: the information must be "easily, directly and permanently accessible". You need the name, a geographic address, contact details including an email address that makes it possible to contact you rapidly, details of any trade or public register you are entered in with the registration number, your VAT number if registered, and particulars of the relevant supervisory authority where the activity requires authorisation.

That last one catches agents specifically. Estate agency work is supervised for anti-money-laundering purposes, so the prudent reading is that HMRC and your registration number belong on the site.

"Permanently accessible" is why all of this goes in the footer of every page rather than on a contact page somebody has to find.

### Fees, redress and client money, if you let

Section 83 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 is the most website-specific duty in agency law and it is routinely half-done.

A letting agent must publish a list of its relevant fees at each premises where it deals with people face to face, and on its website if it has one. Each fee must be described well enough that someone understands what service it buys, and must be stated inclusive of any applicable tax or, where the amount cannot reasonably be worked out in advance, with a description of how it is calculated. For fees tenants are liable to pay, you must also indicate whether the fee is per property or per tenant.

Displayed with that list, you must also state that you are a member of a redress scheme and name the scheme, and state which client money protection scheme you belong to.

Where you advertise English properties on somebody else's site, that information has to be there too, or a link to the page on yours. A trading standards authority can impose a penalty of up to £5,000 for a breach of any of this.

Client money protection has a display duty of its own. If you hold clients' money you must publish a copy of your membership certificate on your website, display it in any public-facing office, and supply a copy free on request. That is the certificate itself, not a sentence saying you have one. Failing to join a scheme carries a penalty of up to £30,000. Failing to display or provide the certificate carries up to £5,000.

Redress membership is mandatory for both sales and lettings. The penalty for doing estate agency work without it is a fixed £1,000 penalty charge; for lettings and property management in England it is up to £5,000. In a case decided by the Upper Tribunal in March 2019, a London firm fined £3,000 by Newham Council lost its appeal: it held Property Ombudsman membership for sales and lettings but not for property management work. Cover has to span every service line you advertise.

If you join The Property Ombudsman, its membership obligations separately require TPO's name and website address on your website, in your terms of business and in any sales or service contract, and the relevant TPO logo on office windows, your website and letterheads as well as on property particulars and advertisements.

### EPC ratings in adverts

Regulation 11 of the Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) Regulations 2012 requires that where a property with a valid certificate is offered for sale or rent, the energy performance rating "is stated in any advertisement of the sale or rental in commercial media".

Commercial media includes your own website, not only the portals. The duty is to state the rating, so a graphic showing a coloured bar without the letter band does not do it, and the field must never silently default or sit empty on a live listing. EPC reform will eventually replace the single A to G rating with four domestic metrics, but new-style certificates are not expected until the second half of 2027 and regulation 11 is unchanged in the meantime.

### Cookies and the privacy notice

This is the part most startup advice gets wrong, because the law changed.

Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations was rewritten on 5 February 2026 by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. Storing or reading anything on a visitor's device still needs consent unless it falls inside the new Schedule A1. Two of those exceptions matter to an agency site. Analytics no longer needs consent if its sole purpose is collecting statistics about how the site is used in order to improve it, the data is not shared with anyone except to help make those improvements, and you tell visitors about it and give them a simple, free way to object. The same goes for storage that remembers display preferences. Everything else, advertising and remarketing tags above all, still needs consent before it fires.

The regulator's guidance, finalised on 29 April 2026, is blunt about the limits: the exception does not allow you to monitor or track individual visitors, and to rely on it your analytics provider must be your processor rather than a joint controller. Most default Google Analytics installations fail that second test, so if you want analytics without a consent gate, configure it deliberately and write down why it qualifies.

A banner that announces cookies while advertising scripts have already run is not compliance, it is decoration. The maximum PECR fine rose on 5 February 2026 from £500,000 to £17.5m or 4 per cent of worldwide turnover.

Your privacy notice has more to cover than most businesses: applicant referencing, Right to Rent, and the identity documents you keep for anti-money-laundering purposes, each with its lawful basis and retention period.

The area with no official answer

Here is the thing a new agency most needs to know, and the thing nobody will tell you straight.

When Chapter 1 of Part 4 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force on 6 April 2025, it repealed the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations. A month later, on 8 May 2025, National Trading Standards withdrew its Material Information Guidance, Parts A, B and C. Enforcement moved to the CMA, which has said it has no plans to produce sector-specific guidance of any kind. The government consulted between October and December 2025 and committed in its June 2026 Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap to publishing non-statutory guidance during 2026. As at 7 October 2026 it had not appeared.

So there is currently no official list of what counts as material information in a property listing.

The duty did not go away, and in one respect it got stricter. Under section 225(4)(b) of the Act, omitting material information from an "invitation to purchase" is unfair without anyone having to show the omission changed a consumer's decision. An invitation to purchase is information that indicates a product's characteristics and its price and lets the consumer decide whether to buy, so a priced property listing will normally be one. Outside that, an omission still has to be likely to have changed the average consumer's decision.

And here is the trap. The withdrawn 2023 guidance is still circulating on industry websites, still being shared as a checklist, still perfectly findable, in at least one case hosted as a PDF by a professional body. It is a reasonable practical starting point and we are not going to pretend otherwise, but it is withdrawn guidance interpreting repealed regulations, and nobody should describe it to a client or a vendor as current.

The honest working position for a new agency is to follow the Act itself, the CMA's general unfair commercial practices guidance, and the portals' own compliance requirements, which have become the de facto standard by default. Then watch for the government guidance, because when it lands it will change what your listing template needs to collect.

What you pay in year one

Anti-money-laundering registration with HMRC changed on 1 December 2025 and is widely misquoted. It is a non-refundable £300 application fee, plus £400 for each premises, plus £40 for each person put through approval checks, then £400 per premises annually. For a single office that is £700 plus £40 a head to start. If your turnover is under £5,000 you can claim a small business reduction, which is a £500 refund after acceptance rather than a lower bill up front.

Register before you trade. Trading as an estate agency business while unregistered is a criminal offence and can bring a penalty or prosecution, though HMRC does allow an estate agency business to trade while its application is being processed.

Lettings is different, and this is the point that saves a lettings-only startup several hundred pounds. Letting agency work only falls inside the money laundering regulations where the monthly rent for an individual letting is 10,000 euros or more and the letting runs for a month or longer. Below that, a lettings-only agency does not register and should not pay to. If you also offer estate agency services, you register for those.

The data protection fee, now paid to the Information Commission which succeeded the ICO on 30 September 2026, is £52 for a new agency, or £47 by direct debit. The commonly quoted £2,900 top tier is out of date: the tiers changed in February 2025 and the top tier is now £3,763. You will be tier one.

Then redress scheme membership, and client money protection if you will hold rent or deposits.

What is coming, and what is not here yet

Agent licensing and qualifications. On 29 September 2026 the Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary, Angela Rayner, pledged at the Labour conference that estate, letting and managing agents would need a licence and appropriate qualifications, with an independent regulator setting standards and able to remove licences. Propertymark's chief executive, Nathan Emerson, welcomed it, saying professional agents "are increasingly being undercut by unqualified and inexperienced operators who are not held to the same professional standards".

What was not announced is everything operational: the regulator's structure, the qualifications required, how licensing would be funded, transitional arrangements and an implementation timetable. There is no bill. The government's own roadmap sequences a non-statutory code of practice first, during 2026, then consultation on mandatory qualifications in 2027 to 2028, then legislation when parliamentary time allows. The code of practice had not been published as at 7 October 2026 either.

If you are starting now, you face no licensing or qualification requirement. Plan for one arriving. Do not wait for it.

The private rented sector database. If you are letting, this is the real date in your diary. Registration opens region by region, beginning with the West Midlands on 15 December 2026 and ending with the South West on 15 August 2027, each region having three months from opening. The fee is £65 per property per year. It is not fixed in the regulations: the database operator sets it by reference to its relevant costs, so it can change.

Two things agents get wrong about it. The landlord is responsible for starting and ending a registration, not you, although a letting agent or property manager can supply certain information on a landlord's behalf. And the requirement to include landlord and property identifiers in adverts is confirmed as coming but has no commencement date at all. Do not build a listing template that treats it as live, and do not let anyone tell you it starts in December.

The order to actually do it in

1. Incorporate, and decide now whether your trading name and your registered name differ, because the website has to carry both.
2. Register with HMRC for anti-money-laundering supervision before you trade, if you will do estate agency work, or lettings at 10,000 euros a month or more.
3. Join a redress scheme. It gates the portals.
4. Join a client money protection scheme if you will hold client money.
5. Pay the data protection fee.
6. Build the website with the footer, the fee page, the CMP certificate, the EPC field and the consent logic designed in, rather than added once somebody notices.
7. Approach the portals, with the site already consistent with Companies House.
8. Then do the branding you actually wanted to start with.

The reason the website sits at six rather than at the end is that four of the five items above it have to be visible on it.