Material information: publishing what nobody checked

A property listing is a set of claims, and the dangerous claims are the ones made by omission. When a listing is silent on flood history, a buyer reads the silence as "no flooding" — and if the truth is that nobody ever checked, the silence has misled them. Material information is the discipline of never letting "nobody looked" masquerade as "nothing to report."

What are the three parts?

Part A applies to every property: price, tenure, council tax band, and the handful of facts no listing may omit. Parts B and C apply where relevant — rights of way, flood history, restrictive covenants, mining, cladding. The parts decide what must be addressed; the three states decide how.

Why is 'not known' a separate state?

Because collapsing it into either of the others misleads. Record a not-known fact as "not applicable" and you have claimed something you do not know. Leave it blank and the buyer fills the blank with an assumption. The only honest option is a third state that says, on the face of the listing, that the question was asked and not answered — and names who was asked, so the buyer knows whose silence they are reading. That is what turns an omission into a disclosure.

The consumer protection regime makes this a legal distinction, not a stylistic one. A misleading omission is as much a breach as a misleading statement, and the current rules treat the failure to disclose material information the average consumer needs as exactly that kind of omission. "Nobody looked," published as though nothing were wrong, is the textbook case.

What does an unanswered question stop?

A Part A question with no answer stops the property being marketed at all — and because marketing is a precondition of a reveal, it stops the deal moving forward until the gap is filled. This is deliberate. The incentive on any listing is to go live and sort the details later; a gate that refuses to market an incomplete Part A removes that incentive, because "later" is where disclosure quietly dies.

Material information is one of several gates a listing clears before it is marketed, and they do different jobs. Seller Protection asks whether the transaction should happen at all and can block it outright. Customer due diligence asks who is actually selling — the person on the telephone is often not the registered proprietor. Material information asks what the buyer must be told about the property itself. A listing can satisfy one and fail another, which is why they are separate gates rather than a single checkbox, and why the completion probability of a deal rests on all three.

What it changes about a listing

• A silence is never published as a fact — an unestablished point is shown as not known, with who was asked.
• An incomplete Part A blocks marketing rather than going live with a gap.
• The buyer can tell a checked fact from an unchecked one, which is the entire point of the exercise.
• The record of who was asked travels with the listing, so a later challenge can be answered.

Most of what makes a listing trustworthy is not the facts it states but the honesty of its gaps. A platform that publishes "not known — we asked the executor and it is being established" is more credible than one whose listings are suspiciously complete, and it is on the right side of the law while being so.