Nobody wants to go first
Thought Leadership by Olivier Januiax Founder of Nestlink
‘Picture this, you have invited two estate agents to carry out a market appraisal on your home, because you want to sell. The first agent into bat explains, with the earnestness of someone who has read the MHCLG’s June roadmap, that before the property goes to market the seller will want to commission searches, a condition report and a seller questionnaire, at a cost of several hundred pounds, so that buyers can see everything upfront and nothing falls over in week nine.
You freak out a little bit. You have had generations of being told that selling your house is basically free. The second agent comes in and says they can have it on Rightmove by Thursday and will list the property at £599,999 because “lots of 9’s confuses people”. Guess who gets the instruction?
This is the problem with a voluntary upfront information regime, and it is not a technology problem. It is a game theory problem, and game theory does not care how good your market appraisal presentation is.
The Data is Ready-ish
In July, the Residential Logbook Association published a benchmarking survey of its own members and found that suppliers already provide 70% of the fourteen categories of sales pack information listed in Annex B of the government’s roadmap: 47% as standard, 23% on request, with a further 11% in development. “The picture this survey paints is of a market that is ready,” said the spokesperson.
It is a trade body and corporate entity asking its own members whether they are good at their jobs, so a pinch of salt is advisable, but the direction of travel is probably right. A week later Landmark launched Sales Pack Ready, a bundle of a personal local search, a drainage and water search and an environmental report, positioned squarely as “reform-ready”.
Landmark’s own data puts instruction to completion at 123 days, up 64% since 2007. Vendor data too, but it rhymes closely enough with the government’s own 120-day figure to be believed. And yes, a big issue lies with a handful of councils still refusing to digitise and innovate due to budget allocations, at a time where technological development has never been cheaper and more accessible.
So, fine, the packs can be built. The packs could be built in 2007, when they were called a HIP (Home Information Pack). Capability was never really the question. The questions are who pays, who goes first, and what should estate agents be doing right now?
England tried then ran away
The Home Information Pack (HIP) was promised in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, went live in 2007, and survived roughly as long as the average recent Prime Minister. On 21 May 2010 Eric Pickles suspended it, describing it as “expensive and unnecessary” and blaming it for stifling a fragile market. The legislation was repealed in 2012.
The abolition impact assessment, which I have read so that you never have to, worked on the basis that one in five transactions failed, and noted with some regret that once searches moved back to the buyer, the searches in every failed sale would simply be thrown away. Sixteen years later the government’s own consultation puts the failure rate at around one in three.
Correlation is not causation, and I would not dream of suggesting otherwise. I would merely observe that we removed the thing designed to reduce wasted transactions and then had more wasted transactions.
Scotland, meanwhile, introduced the Home Report in December 2008, made the seller pay for it, kept it, and has now run seventeen years of a mandatory upfront pack that typically costs somewhere between £285 and £450. Scottish property still changes hands. Scottish agents still exist and do rather well.
The sky has remained in its accustomed position. The lesson is uncomfortable for the old guards of the English property industry. England is not being asked to innovate, it is being asked to stop flinching.
Agents are getting punished
Here is the bit the MHCLG roadmap does not seem to acknowledge to the great frustration of certain rather outspoken members of the industry groups advising it. Until the pack is mandatory, the seller who pays for one is subsidising a market that has not asked them to do so.
The Digital Property Market Steering Group (DPMSG) is the industry body through which the government engages the property data and proptech sector, and it owns the Property Data Trust Framework that any of this will eventually run on.
As founder of NestLink, I sit in the proptech consultant group. I can tell you from the inside, the polite conversations conceal significant frustrations hidden behind corporate self-interest.
With property stockpiling up and buyers squeezing on price, “you need to spend £400 before I will list your home” is not a value proposition, it is a reason to call the agent down the road. So, the agent who does it properly loses instructions to the agent who does not, right up until the day the law makes them equal.
There is also a contradiction nobody has resolved. Material information duties already bite on the agent under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, in force since April 2025, and the NTSELAT guidance that used to define their scope has been withdrawn.
An agent arguably already owes a chunk of the pack, at their own cost, while the roadmap proposes the seller voluntarily pays for a superset of it. Two regimes, two payers, one set of documents, or maybe 2 sets of the same document? Nobody really knows right now.
If you want to know how well the existing duty is going, iamproperty reviewed 150 Rightmove listings last year and found that precisely none of them were fully compliant. Zero. Utilities information appeared on 7.5%. Three quarters omitted the property size. Not one disclosed building safety or risk. That is under the DMCCA law we already have.
Voluntary upfront information is a tax on conscientiousness, levied on precisely the firms the reforms most need to succeed. And the day of reform is not close.
I do not want to be doom and gloom but I am in the room
RICS has suggested to the government that a minimum 24-month implementation period will be essential for upfront information to be properly implemented. No bill has been introduced. Then, add drafting, further consultation, Parliamentary time and the two years of roadmap, and the mandatory date drifts comfortably past the next general election.
Despite cross-party interests, it becomes at risk of being quietly killed by whoever has the biggest check and vested interest to do so. The government has also committed that nobody will be forced into binding contracts until sales packs have been “fully tested and embedded”, which chains the hard reform to the soft one, and chains the soft one to whoever goes first.
The buyer is not even on the roadmap
UK Finance’s Property Reform consultation response contains the most interesting sentence of the whole exercise: if upfront information works, binding contracts may become less imperative. The lenders are politely pointing out that we might be about to build the difficult bit before the easy bit has had a chance to make it unnecessary.
Follow that logic one step further and the stalemate has an exit. Upfront information only “works” if it changes what a buyer does. A pack only a conveyancer opens is a compliance cost, and compliance costs get avoided, dodged, and grumbled about. A pack that makes a buyer offer with more confidence and withdraw less often is a marketing asset, and agents have never needed persuading to pay for one of those.
The reason nobody wants to go first is that the industry is currently expanding the compliance option, packaged as reform, and moving it earlier in the process.
Delivering the information and explaining it are not the same job
Fourteen categories of Annex B data, arriving as fourteen documents written for solicitors and surveyors, but for solicitors and surveyors, it is not transparency, it is homework. Most buyers cannot read a title register, do not know what a drainage and water search is supposed to tell them, and will fill the gap the way they fill every gap now: asking a chatbot that has never seen the property.
Good solicitors will try their best to explain this, but they do not really have the time, nor the fees. The government’s answer to the problem is upfront information. That is only half an answer. The other half is explaining it, and nobody has been made responsible for that half.
The logbook companies got to this first, which is why that corner of the sector is further along than it looks. Chimni, National Deeds Depository, AHMS and Homeowners Passport, working to the RLBA’s Core Logbook Specification agreed with government back in 2020, have spent years arguing that data belongs to the home rather than to the transaction, and should survive the sale rather than being thrown away with it.
In June, the RLBA began a twelve-month proof of concept with HM Land Registry to give homeowners access to their own title data through their logbook provider. That is a record layer being built properly, by the industry, without waiting for a commencement date.
What a record does not do, deliberately, is tell the buyer what any of it means. That is the half NestLink has been building KnowYourNest around, and the design choices matter more than the pitch. Every property resolves to its UPRN, so data is attached to the building and home rather than to a postal address that three databases determine differently.
The property carries one baseline score, the NestScore, computed deterministically across twenty-nine models in five sections covering financial security, home and health, area and lifestyle, legal and planning, and future risk. The AI layer writes the explanation and never the number, which sounds like a footnote and is in fact the entire trust proposition. Every figure shows its source.
The commentary is written to the plain English standard the government uses for its own guidance, on the assumption that a buyer is not a surveyor and should not have to become one. Reports are priced at £9.95, and the area and postcode data underneath them is free, because aggregating public data is not a thing anyone should be charging for.
Just how do you get everyone onboard with a new regime?
That last point is the one the industry should sit with. Experian’s moat was never the data. It was that everybody eventually agreed to use the same number, and that number cost the consumer nothing to see. Property has spent fifteen years doing the opposite: enclosing public data, selling it back in professional formats, and then wondering why a third of transactions fall over.
If the sales pack becomes another £400 gate in front of a house, it will be repealed by 2032 for exactly the reasons the HIP was. If it becomes the moment a buyer finally understands what they are buying, for the price of a takeaway, it survives.
The suppliers are ready. They were ready in 2007. The legislation will come, eventually, probably, subject to the next election and the temperament of the next Secretary of State.
In the gap, the industry gets to decide whether the voluntary period is a cost to be dodged, or a head start to be taken, and whether the consumer is the person it charges or the person it finally serves. Scotland took it seventeen years ago.
England is still looking at the other agent across the table, waiting for them to blink.’
