One in four agreed sales never completes. The fix starts at instruction.

Kotini has partnered with The Able Agent to give agents free training on material information. We think it is a commercial decision more than a compliance one, and the fall-through numbers suggest the same.

Every September, a few million children go back to school with a fresh uniform, a pencil case and the assumption that there is still a great deal they do not know. Nobody finds this embarrassing. It is September. That is what September is for.

Then, at some point in your twenties, it stops. Learning quietly changes from something that happens to you into something you authorise for other people, and the last time anybody formally checked what you knew was a very long time ago.

Estate agency has an acute version of this. You do the job for fifteen years, you get genuinely good at it, and the expertise becomes so much a part of how you work that it stops being examined. Meanwhile the ground moves. The rules about what you have to tell a buyer were rewritten. The checklist the whole industry learned them from was quietly taken away. What a seller is expected to have ready before anyone commits keeps growing, and the penalties for getting it wrong keep getting heavier.

We have teamed up with The Able Agent across August and September for that reason. Nobody in this industry is “finished”, and the agents who act like they are might be leaving money on the table.

That reads like a sentiment. It is a commercial argument, and we can show you the sums.

The gap between what your team knew five years ago and what the job requires now is expensive. Not expensive in the vague way training is usually described as an investment. Expensive in a specific, traceable way: the question your valuer does not ask on a Tuesday afternoon becomes the reason a sale collapses in November, and the reason you were talked down on fee to win the instruction in the first place.

What material information requires now

Material information is any information an average consumer would need in order to make an informed transactional decision about a property. Withholding it, or presenting it in a way that misleads, is a breach of the DMCC Act 2024.

Here is the part a lot of agents have not fully absorbed.

The three-part checklist the industry learned material information from was National Trading Standards guidance. It was removed in May 2025 [3,4].

Only the guidance went. The duty did not.

You still have to tell buyers what matters. What changed is who polices it: the Competition and Markets Authority now holds enforcement, and the CMA can fine you directly without going to court [3].

The threshold got stricter too, and this is the part worth reading twice. Something is material if it could reasonably influence a buyer’s decision to view, offer on or buy [7]. That has not changed. What has changed is that once information is material, leaving it out is an unfair commercial practice in its own right. You no longer get to argue that this particular buyer would have gone ahead anyway [3].

Replacement guidance is coming, but it is not here yet. The government published its response to the material information in property listings consultation in June 2026, alongside a reform roadmap committing to non-statutory material information guidance later this year [7,10]. Until it lands, there is no checklist.

That is a judgement call. It is not a form-filling exercise, and it cannot be delegated to a checklist that no longer exists.

Which is the whole reason we are writing this. Judgement is a function of knowledge, and the specific knowledge in question cannot be pulled from a portal, a title register or an AI summary of the postcode. An agent has to stand in somebody’s front room and ask a series of questions the homeowner would rather not be asked. Whether that happens well depends entirely on whether the person asking knows what they are looking for.

The uncomfortable part about your fee

There is a line from one of our recent podcast conversations that we have not been able to shake:

“The sad fact of it is that they can go to an agent for £2,000 and still get as bad a service as they would have been doing themselves.” – David Mintz, speaking on the Kotini Coffee Table [12]

Price is not a proxy for competence, and the market has worked that out. Every fee conversation an agency owner has ever lost has been lost because the vendor could not identify what they were being asked to pay more for. If your answer is marketing reach, portal presence or local knowledge, you are describing things the vendor believes every agent in town has.

Knowledge is the exception. It is visible, it is immediate, and it is impossible to fake in somebody’s front room.

Charlotte Jeffrey-Campbell, Director of The Able Agent, makes the point better than we can:

“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 [11]

That is not a compliance script. It is the single most persuasive thing that can happen at a market appraisal, because it is the moment the vendor realises the person in front of them is doing a different job from the two agents who came before.

Charlotte’s diagnosis of why it happens so rarely is blunt, and we agree with it: as an industry we are good at selling to win instructions and weak at advice-led selling. “Instructions are vanity, sales are sanity” is a phrase most agents have heard on a training course. Very few businesses are structured as though they believe it.

The agents who deliver the bad news alongside the good news win fewer arguments at the appraisal and get more completions at the end. One of those things shows up in a weekly meeting. The other shows up in the bank.

Where sales actually die

This is where the data stopped being an abstraction for us.

TwentyEA put the national fall-through rate at 23.7% for the first quarter of 2026, down slightly from 24.0% the quarter before [1]. Close to one in four agreed sales does not reach completion.

The timing matters more than the headline. According to the same data, 38% of all fall-throughs happen in the first four weeks after a sale is agreed, with weeks one and two alone accounting for nearly 16%. After week twelve, the weekly share drops below 3% [1].

Read that again as an operational fact rather than a statistic. The risk in your pipeline is front-loaded. It is concentrated in the fortnight immediately after you agree a sale, which is precisely the window in which everything the vendor failed to mention comes to light.

Separate analysis from Quick Move Now on Q1 2026 fall-throughs found survey issues to be the single largest cause at 37.5%, ahead of a change of heart at 31.25%, with lending and chain breaks at 12.5% each and legal complexity making up the rest [2].

Survey issues. The largest cause of collapsed sales in the country is physical facts about the building that nobody established before it went on the market. Which is to say: the largest cause of collapsed sales is a conversation that did not happen at the appraisal.

You cannot survey-proof a house. You can absolutely find out about the extension with no building regulations sign-off, the boundary that does not match the title plan, and the flat roof done by a friend in 2019, before a buyer’s surveyor finds them on your behalf in week two.

“I have been doing this twenty years”

If you own an agency, you probably know a thing or two about valuations, and you may well be reading this thinking that none of it is news to you. You are likely right. This is the part where most training pitches quietly insult their audience, so we will try not to.

The argument is not that experienced agents do not know their job. It is that the job has a moving surface, and nobody’s knowledge tracks it perfectly. Charlotte again:

“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 [11]

The value of structured training for an experienced agent is rarely the new information. It is the audit. It tells you which of the things you are confident about are actually correct, and it does so in a room rather than in front of a vendor or a regulator.

This is the bit of the back-to-school analogy that we think actually holds. A seven-year-old is not embarrassed to be taught something, because being taught is simply their job that year. Somewhere between there and running an agency, most of us picked up the idea that being taught implies a deficiency. It does not. It implies a moving target, and this industry has one of the fastest-moving targets in the country.

One warning from Charlotte that we think agency owners should take seriously. Tying qualifications to pay works as an incentive and corrupts the reason:

“I’m very anti-tick box exercise training, because I don’t think there’s any point in doing it just to get a qualification. It should be that you’re better in your job.” – Charlotte Jeffrey-Campbell, Director, The Able Agent [11]

If your team completes a course to unlock a pay rise, you have bought certificates. If they complete it because the next appraisal goes better, you have bought competence. The difference will show up in your conversion and fall-through rates either way.

What our software cannot do

This is the part of the piece where a software company is supposed to reveal that the software is the answer.

Kotini makes onboarding and compliance fast. We take the friction out of ID checks, AML, and getting a client on the market without a paperwork queue.

One of our podcast guests, David Mintz, described that side of the job better than we could, and reached for a restaurant to do it:

“We as agents are there to make it seem seamless. But let’s be honest, behind the scenes in the kitchen… it is mayhem and chaos in there, and we’re shouting at each other, and there’s a lot of effort that goes into every dish that we prepare. And I think that we need to be able to convey that properly with respect.” – David Mintz, speaking on the Kotini Coffee Table [12]

The analogy is right, and it also contains the limit of what any software can do. A compliant process operated by somebody who does not understand why the questions are there still produces a bad transaction. Our platform can put a question about planning permission in front of a valuer and store whatever comes back. It cannot tell that the answer was thin, and it cannot know that a vague yes about an extension should have led to three more questions.

We cannot supply judgement. Nobody’s software can. It is the one part of this job that still sits entirely with the agent standing in the front room.

That is why we have partnered with The Able Agent. So agents can level up their skill in using this information, and streamline the process of gathering it.

What it does do

Amongst many other things, Kotini collects material information for a living. We are a founding member of the Open Property Data Association and a licensed TA form provider, so what we gather lines up with the standards the rest of the transaction runs on.

The platform digests what comes back and surfaces what matters upfront, while it can still change a decision, rather than leaving it in a file for somebody to find later.

Then it prepares that information for what comes next. Because we are licensed for TA6 and TA7, those forms are built from answers already captured at instruction. Transparency arrives early instead of in week three, which is where 38% of fall-throughs happen and the tension is highest.

Consistency has a quieter benefit too. When every instruction is captured the same way, you have a file you can actually audit, which matters more now that the CMA can act without going near a court and there is no checklist to point at as your defence.

So the division of labour is straightforward. The Able Agent changes what your people know to ask. We make sure that when they ask it, the answer is captured once, recorded properly, and already in front of whoever needs it next.

Why get ahead

The most reasonable objection to any of this came from Kristjan Byfield, co-founder of The Depositary, and it is about enforcement:

“If it’s not policed, if it’s not enforced, then it just sits in the pile with everything else we already do that is just a burden on good businesses.” – Kristjan Byfield, Co-Founder, The Depositary [12]

That is fair, and it is the strongest argument for not waiting. Mandatory qualifications are no longer a vague prospect. The government’s June 2026 roadmap commits to consulting on them in 2027, and to exploring training and apprenticeship support for the sector before that [7,9]. If they arrive without enforcement behind them, the firms who comply carry a cost the firms who ignore it do not.

So we would not treat this as a regulatory question at all. Competence is a differentiator right up to the moment it becomes a legal minimum, and then it is just the price of trading. Train your team while it is still optional and you can charge for something your competitors do not have. Wait until it is compulsory and you will do the same work later, with no fee advantage and less time to do it.

Sarka Wilde, Director of Distinct Property Consultants, put the commercial end of it plainly:

“People really need to learn to be proud of being estate agent. Once we are all proud of what we are doing, it will be easier to go to valuation and say, these are my fees, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry.” – Sarka Wilde, Distinct Property Consultants [12]

What to do this term

If you want to act on one thing before the autumn market gets going:

1. Audit one appraisal. Go out with your best valuer and count the material information questions actually asked. Then take each one you did not hear and ask whether a buyer would want to know. Not whether it would change their mind. Whether they would want to know. The gap is your training brief.
2. Fix the front of the process, not the middle. Given that 38% of fall-throughs happen in the first four weeks, effort spent at instruction is worth several times the same effort spent chasing a sale in week ten.
3. Get the knowledge formally checked. Not for the certificate. For the audit.
4. Put it in the fee conversation on purpose. If your team is asking better questions than the competition and not saying so out loud, you are absorbing the cost of expertise without charging for it.
5. Send your most experienced person first. Everyone’s instinct is to train the newest recruit. The newest recruit has no false confidence to correct.

We have partnered with The Able Agent because their material information and DMCC training does the one thing we cannot do from inside a software platform: it changes what the person at the appraisal knows to ask, and gives them the professional confidence that goes with it. The Able Agent handle the knowledge uplift, we handle the process. Kotini customers get that course free through us. Get in touch with harvey@kotini.co.uk to redeem.

Somewhere in your patch, an agent is going to spend this term learning what to ask. In a few months they will walk into a valuation you wanted, ask sharper questions than you did, and hold their fee while they do it.

Term starts in September. Worth deciding now which side of that appraisal you are on.

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Common questions

What is material information in property? Material information is information a buyer would reasonably need in order to make an informed decision about a property, meaning anything that could reasonably influence their decision to view, offer on or buy [7]. Since the DMCC Act 2024 took effect there is no property-specific checklist defining it, and omitting material information is an unfair commercial practice in its own right, no longer subject to the old test of whether that particular omission would have changed the consumer’s decision [3].

Is there still a Parts A, B and C material information framework? No. The three-part National Trading Standards guidance was removed in May 2025, after the Consumer Protection Regulations it was written to support were superseded by the DMCC Act 2024 [3,4]. The legal duty to disclose material information continues under the DMCC Act. The government has committed to publishing non-statutory replacement guidance during 2026, but no property-specific framework is in force at the time of writing [7].

Is material information still governed by the CPRs? No. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Act 2024 replaced the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations. The obligations carry across, and enforcement now sits with the Competition and Markets Authority, which can impose fines without going through a court.

Does providing material information upfront reduce fall-throughs? It addresses the largest single cause of them. Quick Move Now’s analysis of Q1 2026 fall-throughs found survey issues to be the leading trigger at 37.5% [2], and TwentyEA data shows 38% of all fall-throughs occur within four weeks of a sale being agreed [1]. Establishing physical and legal facts about a property before it is marketed removes a substantial share of that risk.

Can material information gathered at the appraisal be reused for conveyancing? Yes, and much of it should be. The questions a valuer asks at instruction overlap heavily with what a conveyancer later needs from the seller. Kotini is a founding member of the Open Property Data Association and a licensed provider of the TA6 and TA7 forms, the Law Society’s property and leasehold information forms, and prepares them from data already captured during onboarding, so the same answers are not chased twice.

How many UK property sales fall through? TwentyEA recorded a national fall-through rate of 23.7% in Q1 2026, down from 24.0% the previous quarter [1]. Close to one in four agreed sales does not complete.

Are qualifications going to become mandatory for estate agents? Not yet, but the direction is now on record. The government’s home buying and selling reform roadmap, published in June 2026, commits to consulting on mandatory qualifications in 2027, having been recommended through the Regulation of Property Agents review some years earlier [7,9]. Agencies that qualify their teams voluntarily hold a commercial advantage for as long as it stays optional.

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References

1. PropertyWire. Property fall-throughs decline to 23.7% in early 2026 [Internet]. 2026 Apr 16. Available from: https://www.propertywire.com/news/property-fall-throughs-decline-to-23-7-in-early-2026/
2. ValuQ. How often do UK house sales fall through? [Internet]. 2026 May 21. Available from: https://valuq.co.uk/insights/how-often-do-house-sales-fall-through-uk-2026
3. Propertymark. Material information guidance withdrawn as the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act takes over [Internet]. Warwick: Propertymark; 2025 May 9. Available from: https://www.propertymark.co.uk/resource/material-information-guidance-withdrawn-as-the-digital-markets-competition-and-consumers-act-takes-over.html
4. Today’s Conveyancer. NTSELAT material information guidance withdrawn but duty to report remains [Internet]. 2025 May 14. Available from: https://todaysconveyancer.co.uk/ntselat-material-information-guidance-withdrawn-but-duty-remains/
5. The Negotiator. Material information rules axed overnight as new consumer act takes precedence [Internet]. 2025 May 9. Available from: https://thenegotiator.co.uk/news/regulation-law-news/material-information-rules-axed-overnight-as-new-consumer-act-takes-precedence/
6. Estate Agent Today. Mystery as estate agent material information guidance disappears [Internet]. 2025 May 9. Available from: https://www.estateagenttoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2025/05/mystery-as-estate-agent-material-information-guidance-disappears/
7. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Home buying and selling reform roadmap [Internet]. London: GOV.UK; 2026 Jun 19. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/home-buying-and-selling-reform/outcome/home-buying-and-selling-reform-roadmap
8. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Material information in property listings [Internet]. London: Citizen Space; 2025. Available from: https://consult.communities.gov.uk/home-buying-and-selling/material-information-in-property-listings/
9. TLT LLP. Government announces once-in-a-generation overhaul of the home buying and selling system [Internet]. 2026 Jun 24. Available from: https://www.tlt.com/insights-and-events/insight/government-announces-once-in-a-generation-overhaul-of-the-home-buying-and-selling-system
10. UK Parliament. Home buying and selling: written statement HLWS134 [Internet]. London: UK Parliament; 2026 Jun 22. Available from: https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2026-06-22/hlws134
11. Jeffrey-Campbell C. Interviewed on: Kotini Coffee Table. Home buying and selling reform roadmap episode. Kotini; 2026.
12. Mintz D, Byfield K, Wilde S. Interviewed on: Kotini Coffee Table. Behind the fee episode. Kotini; 2026.
13. The Able Agent. Consumer regulations, material information and the DMCC Act [Internet]. [no date given]. Available from: https://www.theableagent.co.uk/consumer-regulations-material-information-and-dmcc-act/
14. Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, Part 4, Chapter 1 [Internet]. London: The National Archives; 2024. Available from: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/part/4/chapter/1
15. Competition and Markets Authority. Unfair commercial practices (CMA207) [Internet]. London: GOV.UK. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/unfair-commercial-practices-cma207/unfair-commercial-practices
16. Competition and Markets Authority. What businesses need to know about unfair commercial practices [Internet]. London: GOV.UK. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/what-businesses-need-to-know-about-unfair-commercial-practices/what-businesses-need-to-know-about-unfair-commercial-practices