What actually changed
Between 2022 and 2024 the property industry absorbed a detailed framework: Part A material information required on every listing, Part B required for all properties, Part C required where the property was affected. Agents built processes around it and portals built fields for it.
That guidance has been withdrawn. The legal foundation it stood on — the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 — was repealed by Part 4, Chapter 1 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which applies to commercial practices taking place from 6 April 2025.
What replaced it is a general regime rather than a property-specific checklist, enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority. Its guidance on unfair commercial practices, CMA207, was published on 4 April 2025 and last updated on 18 November 2025.
If your compliance process still refers to Parts A, B and C by name, it is describing a document that is no longer in force. That does not necessarily make your listings wrong — but it means nobody has checked them against the rules that actually apply.
Why the new threshold is harder, not easier
The instinct on reading "the prescriptive guidance was withdrawn" is that the obligation loosened. The opposite is closer to the truth on the point that matters most to a listing.
Under the old regime, an omission generally had to be shown to affect the consumer’s transactional decision. Under the new one, omitting material information from an invitation to purchase is treated as an unfair commercial practice in itself — the question of whether the particular buyer would have behaved differently falls away.
For a property listing that is a meaningful shift. "We left the tenure off and nobody would have cared" was a defence shaped like the old test. It is a weaker argument against a rule that treats the omission itself as the problem.
And there is no checklist to replace it
The uncomfortable part for agents is that nothing has been issued to replace Parts A, B and C with an equivalent list. At the time this page was written, no sector-specific guidance had been published, leaving agents to work from the CMA’s general principles.
The practical consequence is that the withdrawn guidance is still the best available statement of what a buyer needs to know about a property, even though it is no longer the legal test. Price, council tax band and tenure; property type and construction, rooms and measurements, utilities and parking; and then the conditional matters — building safety, restrictions such as listed status or a conservation area, rights and easements, flood risk, planning, accessibility, mining.
Treating that as a working checklist is defensible and sensible. Treating it as the law is not, and an agency whose process says "compliant with NTSELAT Parts A to C" is describing a standard that has been withdrawn.
What this means for an agency website
Two of the things CMA207 covers are squarely website problems rather than listing-copy problems.
Drip pricing — revealing unavoidable charges progressively rather than in the headline price — is prohibited. For an agency that reaches beyond listings into the fees pages: a headline rate with the unavoidable additions arriving later in the journey is the pattern being aimed at.
Fake reviews are among the 32 practices that are unfair in all circumstances. Any agency displaying testimonials it cannot evidence, or review widgets it does not control the provenance of, is carrying a risk in a category with no "but it did not really mislead anyone" defence available.
- Audit your listing template against the withdrawn guidance as a checklist, while describing it internally as best practice rather than as the legal standard.
- Make sure the fields exist and are required in your system, rather than optional ones somebody fills in when they remember.
- Put the full fee position in one place, with nothing unavoidable revealed later.
- Be able to evidence every testimonial on the site, with a date and a source.
- Review your compliance wording. If it names the withdrawn guidance as the standard you meet, it is out of date.
The content opportunity in a rule change
There is a commercial point worth making. A rule change that most of an industry has not noticed is the clearest content opportunity an agency gets, because the people searching for an answer are vendors and other agents and there is very little published that is current.
