customer due diligence
Identifying and verifying who you are transacting with, and who is behind them, before the transaction proceeds.
It asks three separate questions and conflating them is the usual mistake: who is this person, may they actually sell this property, and who stands behind them.
The middle question is where transactions fail. The person on the telephone is very often not the registered proprietor, and an executor, an attorney and a company director each need entirely different evidence of their authority.
Nothing recorded means unchecked. It never means no concerns.
Where this comes up
- The Buyer Readiness Passport, graded A to D
A buyer's identity and funding evidence, graded A to D, deciding whether they may be put in front of a seller at all. Grade C is the trap: we know exactly…
- Material information: publishing what nobody checked
A listing fact has three states, not two: stated, not applicable, and not known — with a record of who was asked. A buyer cannot tell 'no covenants' from…
- Sourcing leads from licensed data, without scraping
Discovery reads only sources with a recorded licence, through a single outbound path that obeys robots.txt and rate limits. A guessed email address is…
- When a deal pack becomes a financial promotion
Direct property purchase sits outside the perimeter. Package it, share it, or publish a return, and the same pack becomes something only an authorised person…