The home buying and selling reform roadmap: what it actually means for agents

The short version

The Government has published a roadmap for reforming home buying and selling in England. It is phased, it runs to the end of this Parliament, and it moves the market toward standardised upfront information provided before a property is marketed rather than assembled after an offer is accepted.

Very little of it is law yet. Most of what applies today is guidance and voluntary practice. But the direction is unambiguous, and firms that wait for the legislation will be doing in six weeks what their competitors have spent two years getting good at.

What is happening now

The current phase focuses on three things: guidance clarifying what material information means in a property listing, voluntary work with industry to define what a sales pack should contain, and a non-statutory Code of Practice setting minimum standards for the professionals involved.

Material information itself is not new, and it is not optional. It is governed by consumer protection law — currently the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act — which requires that a listing does not omit information the average consumer needs to make an informed transactional decision. An agent who omits something material is exposed whether or not a specific guidance note names it.

What is coming next

The roadmap’s middle phase covers an advisory Charter for property professionals, a consultation on mandatory qualifications for estate agents, and work to define what penalties should apply for non-compliance.

The final phase, subject to Parliamentary time, is legislation. That legislation is expected to require sales packs as standard, to set digital data standards, and to address binding contracts earlier in the transaction.

What should agents do now

• Decide where your material information comes from. Seller questionnaires are a starting point, not an evidence base — sellers routinely do not know their own flood risk, tenure detail or drainage arrangements.
• Standardise the process. If every negotiator gathers information differently, your exposure is the weakest instruction, not the average one.
• Get the data-based items from data. Flood, ground stability, planning, connectivity, environmental history and title extent are all available as search products, ordered per instruction, in minutes.
• Keep the evidence. Being able to show what you disclosed, on what basis and when, is the whole point when a complaint arrives eighteen months later.
• Talk to your panel solicitors. If the pack you assemble is one the buyer’s conveyancer can actually use, you have removed weeks from the transaction rather than duplicating work.

The commercial argument, separately from the compliance one

Set aside regulation for a moment. Roughly a third of agreed sales in England fall through, and a substantial share of those failures come from something discovered late that could have been known at the outset: an unadopted road, a flood risk the buyer could not insure, a planning breach, a mine entry, a lease term nobody read.

Finding those things before marketing does not lose you the sale. It loses you the sale you were going to lose anyway, eleven weeks earlier and without the wasted work — and it protects the sales you would otherwise have lost through drift and buyer fatigue.

Where searches fit

Most of the material information a listing needs is search data. We built an upfront information pack for exactly this: ordered per instruction and presented as a client-ready PDF that can be attached to the listing and handed to the buyer’s solicitor.

Published 18 August 2026. This article is general information about conveyancing practice and property regulation. It is not legal advice, and the regulatory position changes — check the current position before relying on it.