Trading Standards Regulations

To help home movers understand the true costs of buying or renting a property in the UK, Trading Standards have been working with stakeholders across the industry to create new Material Information Guidelines around the information required on property listings.

Part A of the guidelines states that agents need to include information about all “unavoidable costs” on property listings to help home movers make an informed decision. This is required for the 1st June 2022.

Part A is focused on 3 areas:

1. Tenure – freehold, leasehold, shared ownership or commonhold, length of lease

2. Council Tax – bands to be included for England, Wales and Scotland (In Northern Ireland, there is a rates system instead of council tax.)

For Northern Ireland Customers only.

If a Property lacks a Tax Rate, it cannot be uploaded unless you specify a minimum price of 0.01p

3. Price – rent and deposit for lettings, price for sales, plus any ground rent and service charge

Parts B and C will follow from Trading Standards at a later date.

It is also advised that the term POA (Price On Application) is misleading and should no longer be used.

To ensure you are compliant you need to ensure you enter this information against your Property records in Acquaint.

For Shared Ownership properties, although the Tenure can be set as such, we advise you to enter the details of the ownership arrangements and the share % within the Property Description.

For rentals, the Deposit is automatically calculated as 5 weeks rent (this can be changed in System Configuration).

For Service Charge & Ground Rent, Acquaint is currently only allowing an amount and not a %. If you are not able to calculate an amount then we advise you to enter the % within the Property Description.

This information will be published to your Acquaint hosted web site and also all portals. For most portals information such as Local Authority, Tax Band, Service Charge and Ground Rent will be appended to the end of the Property Description automatically. We will update feeds to portals as and when they provide bespoke fields for this information.

If you have a web site hosted by a 3rd party, our data feed to your provider will also include this information.

What to do next?

Work through your Available Properties first, and then your Under Offer Properties to ensure this information is correct. The best place to do this is the Property List screen, with the Status filter set accordingly.

 If you have a non-Acquaint web site check that your provider is aware of these new guidelines.