Training and compliance
Back to school for grown-ups: what agents should actually be revising this September
Kotini and The Able Agent make the case for agents taking the same view as schoolchildren in September: there are still things worth learning, and material information should be top of the syllabus.
What is on the syllabus?
Learning did not stop in your twenties. Working life just quietly stopped checking what you know.
Material information has changed. The three-part checklist many agents learned from has not existed since May 2025.
The threshold is stricter. Once information is material, leaving it out is an unfair commercial practice in its own right.
This is about completions, not just compliance. Close to one in four agreed sales fails, and 38% of those failures happen in the first four weeks.
There is a specific kind of shop display that appears in the last weeks of August.
Uniform, lunchboxes, a wall of pencil cases nobody needs. The entire retail sector spends a fortnight reminding several million children that they are about to be taught things they do not currently know, and everybody treats this as completely normal.
Then it stops. Somewhere in your twenties, learning changes from something that happens to you into something you sign off for other people. The last time anyone formally checked what you knew was a very long time ago, and there is no shop window reminding you of it.
Estate agency has a particularly expensive version of this problem, and September is a useful moment for reflection.
Kotini and The Able Agent have teamed up for August and September to do something about it. The Able Agent handles the knowledge uplift, while Kotini handles the process of capturing what comes out of it.
Material information: the topic everybody learned and nobody re-sat
In the last few years, agents would have learned material information from a three-part checklist: Parts A, B and C.
Its usefulness was that it removed the guesswork. You could check a listing against a list and know whether you had done what was expected of you.
That guidance has not existed since May 2025.
National Trading Standards withdrew it after the legal framework it sat on changed.
The guidance existed to help agents comply with the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. But Part 4, Chapter 1 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force on 6th April 2025, repealing those regulations. The guidance had nothing left to stand on.
None of this is breaking news. It is over a year old, which is rather the point. The gap has been sitting there quietly while everyone got on with the job.
What did not go anywhere is the duty. The DMCC Act still recognises material information as the key information a consumer needs to make an informed transactional decision, and failing to provide it is still a breach.
Replacement guidance is coming. The government published its consultation response in June and has committed to non-statutory material information guidance during 2026. It is not here yet.
The part that would catch most people out in an exam
Under the old regulations, an omission was tested against whether it would have changed the average consumer’s decision.
That gave you a defence. Yes, the information was missing, but this buyer would have gone ahead regardless.
That defence has gone. Under the DMCC Act, once information is material, omitting it is automatically an unfair commercial practice, whether or not the omission affected the consumer’s decision.
Materiality itself is still about influence. The government’s own wording describes the obligation as giving buyers information that could reasonably influence their decision to view, offer on or purchase a home.
So the test for what counts as material has not moved. What has moved is your ability to argue your way out of having left it out.
In practice, the working question has shifted:
From “would this have changed their mind?” to “would a buyer want to know?”
What that means day to day:
- Your defence in a challenge is your file, because there is no current guidance document to point at.
- Consistency between valuers matters more than it used to.
- Over-disclosing now costs less than a judgement call that goes the wrong way.
Why this is a completions problem, not a compliance one
Here is the argument for putting material information at the top of the list rather than somewhere in the middle.
TwentyEA put the national fall-through rate at 23.7% for the first quarter of 2026, down slightly from 24.0% the quarter before. Close to one in four agreed sales does not reach completion.
23.7%
national fall-through rate for Q1 2026.
38%
of all fall-throughs happen within four weeks of a sale being agreed.
37.5%
of failed sales were triggered by survey issues, according to Quick Move Now’s analysis.
Fall-through risk is front-loaded. It sits in the fortnight straight after everyone shakes hands, which is precisely when anything the vendor did not mention turns up.
The biggest single cause of collapsed sales is physical facts about a building that nobody established before it went on the market. Which is another way of saying it is a conversation that did not happen at instruction.
You cannot survey-proof a house.
But you can find out about the extension with no building regulations sign-off, the boundary that does not match the title plan and the flat roof a friend did in 2019 before a buyer’s surveyor finds them in week two.
The bit that is actually about your fee
Charlotte Jeffrey-Campbell, who runs The Able Agent, framed this on the Kotini Coffee Table podcast as an opportunity rather than an obligation, and got specific about what it sounds like at the door.
“Material information is a huge opportunity for agents to differentiate themselves. Because if you’re an agent going out and you’re saying, right, one of the things we need to check is, is your title registered? Because if it isn’t, that’s going to slow the process down. Have you had any work done to the property? If you do, have you got planning? If not, that’s going to slow this process down.”
Charlotte Jeffrey-Campbell, Director, The Able Agent
That is not a compliance script being read aloud. It is the moment a vendor works out that the person in front of them is doing a different job from the two agents who came through earlier that week.
Every fee conversation an agency loses is lost because the vendor cannot identify what they are being asked to pay more for. Marketing reach, portal presence and local knowledge do not answer that, because vendors assume every agent in town has all three.
Knowing which questions to ask is the exception. It is immediate, visible and cannot be faked in somebody’s front room.
“What I don’t think we’re good at is that advice-led selling at the beginning. I think we are sales to win instructions, whereas where agents are really successful is when their process involves the bad news as well as the good news, because then you’re much more likely to get the completion at the end of it.”
Charlotte Jeffrey-Campbell, Director, The Able Agent
The obvious objection is that experienced agents do this already. Charlotte’s answer is worth hearing, because it is not a comment on anybody’s competence.
“Everybody has gaps in their knowledge, and we have people saying, I’ve done this for 20 years, I know everything about estate agency, I don’t need to do the learning, and they fail by one mark because there’s one bit of the law that they’re not confident in.”
Charlotte Jeffrey-Campbell, Director, The Able Agent
The value of formal training for an experienced agent is rarely the new information. It is the audit: finding out which of the things you are confident about are still correct in a room, rather than in front of a vendor or a regulator.
Homework
Audit one appraisal
Go out with your best valuer, count the material information questions actually asked, then take each one you did not hear and ask whether a buyer would want to know.
Write your own list
With no published guidance, a consistent internal standard is both your compliance position and your completions defence.
Capture at instruction, not at offer
Information gathered while the vendor is engaged is information you are not chasing from someone who has mentally moved out.
Reuse what you gather
Much of what a conveyancer eventually needs overlaps with what should surface at the appraisal. Asking twice is a delay you chose.
Send your most experienced person first
Everyone’s instinct is to train the newest recruit. The newest recruit has no false confidence to correct.
Nobody is going to hand you a uniform and a timetable this September. That is the only real difference between you and the several million people currently being bought a pencil case.
Go back to school this September
Kotini and The Able Agent have teamed up
Kotini customers get The Able Agent’s course on consumer regulations, material information and the DMCC Act free. Kotini captures material information at instruction in a consistent format on every property, carrying it through to TA6 and TA7.
Kotini provides client onboarding, ID verification and AML compliance for UK estate agents. It is a founding member of the Open Property Data Association and a licensed TA6 and TA7 provider.
