If your agency website was built before 2022, its listing template was designed around a photograph, a price and a paragraph of prose. That was the job at the time.
The job changed. Since May 2022, Part A material information has been required on residential listings. Since November 2023, Parts B and C joined it. The rules say what has to be shown and, importantly for anyone building the site, roughly where it has to sit.
Most agency sites have absorbed this by bolting extra text onto the bottom of the description. It technically gets the words on the page. It also makes the listing worse to read, and it does not really satisfy what the guidance asks for.
What the three parts actually are
Part A is the baseline: price, council tax band and tenure. It has been required since 2022, and the guidance is clear that it belongs on the first page of the listing. Not behind a tab. Not below fourteen photographs.
Part B is information that should be covered for every property. Property type, construction materials, number and type of rooms, utilities, parking.
Part C only applies when a property is actually affected by something. Conservation area, listed status, easements, building safety, known flood risk.
Parts B and C do not have to be on the first page, but the guidance says they should be prominent and accessible, and for online listings no more than one click away.
"One click away" is a design instruction
That phrase is the part worth paying attention to, because it quietly rules out several things agencies commonly do.
A PDF that opens in a new tab is not one click away in any useful sense. Neither is a page that requires scrolling to a footer, clicking through to a separate "additional information" page, and then finding the right heading. A modal that loads slowly on mobile and traps the back button is technically one click and practically a dead end.
What does work is boring and effective. An accordion on the listing page itself, open by default on desktop. A tabbed panel directly beneath the main details. A clearly labelled section that sits in the page rather than somewhere else.
Treat it as data, not as prose
The single change that fixes most of this is to stop storing material information as text and start storing it as fields.
Council tax band is a value from a known set. Tenure is freehold, leasehold or commonhold, and if leasehold there are lease years remaining, ground rent and service charge. Construction materials come from a list. Flood risk is a yes or no with a note.
Once those are fields rather than sentences, several problems disappear at once.
The page can render them consistently on every listing without an agent remembering the format. You can see at a glance which listings are missing something, because a missing field is visible in a way that a missing sentence is not. You can stop a listing publishing while Part A is incomplete. And the layout can put Part A high on the page automatically, rather than depending on where someone happened to type it.
If you cannot run a report that tells you which live listings are missing a council tax band, your material information lives in prose and you are relying on people being careful.
What this does for search, since you will ask
None of this was designed for SEO, and it is worth being honest that Google has no rule about material information. But structured listing data helps anyway, for a plainer reason.
It lets you build filtered pages that are genuinely useful. Two bedroom leasehold flats in a named area with a service charge under a certain figure is a real search that real people make, and a site with the underlying data can answer it with a page. A site storing everything in a description field cannot.
Those filtered pages, when they reflect real inventory and real demand, are usually where an agency's organic traffic actually comes from. Not the homepage.
A practical order to do this in
- Add Part A as three required fields and block publishing without them. Biggest risk reduction, smallest amount of work.
- Move Part A above the description in the listing template so it appears on the first page without scrolling.
- Add Part B as structured fields and render them in an accordion or tab directly on the listing page.
- Add Part C as optional fields that only render when set, so unaffected properties do not show a wall of "not applicable".
- Run a report over live listings and fix the gaps you find. There will be gaps.
Steps one and two are usually a day. They also remove most of the exposure, which is a reasonable place to stop if budget is tight.
Common questions
Does Part A really have to be on the first page of the listing?
The guidance is clear that Part A should be included on the first page. In practice, that means visible when the listing loads, without opening anything. Price, council tax band and tenure together, near the top.
Is a downloadable PDF enough for Parts B and C?
It is a poor answer. The guidance asks for the information to be prominent and accessible, and no more than one click away for online listings. A PDF is technically a click and practically a barrier, particularly on a phone. Put it in the page.
What if we genuinely do not know something?
Saying so is better than leaving it blank or guessing. The rules are about giving people what they need to make an informed decision, and an honest "not known" is information. Silence looks like an omission.
Do these rules apply to lettings as well as sales?
Yes, the material information framework covers residential lettings alongside sales, with the detail differing by what is relevant to a tenancy. If your site treats lettings as a lesser version of the sales template, that is worth revisiting.
Our listings come from our CRM feed. Can we still do this?
Usually, yes. Most agency CRMs already hold more structured data than the website displays, and the fields exist in the feed even when the template ignores them. The work is often in the website rather than the CRM.
How do we keep it accurate once it is live?
Make the fields required at the point of entry rather than auditing later. A publish rule that refuses incomplete Part A is worth more than a monthly check, because it works when nobody is looking.
If your listing template predates the rules
Most do. We can look at how your listings are structured and tell you what would need to change, which is often less than agencies expect because the data is already sitting in the CRM.
Send us a link to a live listing and we will tell you what we would move, add or restructure.
Photo by Joylynn Goh on Unsplash.
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