Can estate agents use AI?

Yes, estate agents can use AI, and it's genuinely useful for enquiries and correspondence, but a property description written by AI can only ever be a first draft, because the law treats every claim in a listing as yours, and a misleading omission in a property advert is now a criminal offence that doesn't require you to have known the listing was misleading.

On top of that, the National Trading Standards guidance on material information - Parts A, B and C - is no longer published. So the duty is stricter than many people realise, enforcement now comes with direct fines, and the plain-English explanation of what the duty means in practice doesn't currently exist. That's the backdrop to a tool that can write appealing property copy in a few seconds.

The rules changed on 6 April 2025

If your compliance file still refers to the "CPRs", it's out of date. The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 were revoked by section 251 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Part 4, Chapter 1 of that Act took their place, and was commenced on 6 April 2025 by SI 2025/272.

The substance mostly carried over, which makes the change easy to miss. Section 227 still treats it as a misleading omission where a practice leaves out "material information", meaning what the average consumer needs to take an informed transactional decision. It also counts as an omission if the information is unclear or untimely, or if the consumer is unlikely to see it. Burying the tenure in the fourteenth paragraph doesn't meet the duty.

Section 230 goes further for what it calls an invitation to purchase. Our reading is that this covers a listing with a price on it, though that's our interpretation rather than settled law. That section requires the main characteristics of the product, the total price or how it will be calculated, the identity of the trader, and anything required "under any other enactment".

The enforcement side is genuinely new. Under section 182, the Competition and Markets Authority can impose a penalty of up to £300,000, or 10% of turnover if that's higher, without going to court first. For an agency of five people, the £300,000 figure is the one that matters.

There's no official explanation yet of "material information" under the new Act

The withdrawal of the National Trading Standards guidance happened quietly. Propertymark, the agents' trade body, reported it on 9 May 2025, linking it to the new Act taking effect a month earlier. We couldn't find a withdrawal notice on the National Trading Standards site itself, so treat that date as reported by the trade press rather than confirmed at source.

What is on the record is what's meant to replace it. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) ran a consultation, Material information in property listings, from 6 October to 29 December 2025, and published its response on 19 June 2026 as part of the home buying and selling reform roadmap. The roadmap commits to publishing non-statutory guidance on the information in property listings during 2026, and a non-statutory Code of Practice for property agents "later this year". Sales packs required before listing will come "when parliamentary time allows". When we last checked, on 27 October 2026, neither had been published.

So the duty applies today, and the official explanation of it is still to come. In the meantime, the CMA's own unfair commercial practices guidance, CMA207, published on 4 April 2025 and updated on 18 November 2025, is the closest thing to an authoritative reading.

Where AI genuinely helps a small agency

None of this means avoiding the technology. AI is good at drafting and summarising, and both are real jobs in a small agency.

Turning valuation notes into a first-draft description works well. You dictate your notes on the drive back and get eight sentences to correct, rather than a blank box at nine at night.

Out-of-hours enquiries are an even better use, and one that gets talked about less. Portal leads arrive at 9pm on a Sunday, and nobody's in the office until Monday. Acknowledging an enquiry, answering what's already public in the listing, and putting a viewing request in front of a person on Monday morning is well within reach.

If evening and weekend portal enquiries are sitting unanswered until Monday, we're happy to set up an automation that acknowledges them straight away and lines up viewing requests for your team.

Then there's the correspondence nobody bills for. Chasing four solicitors for chain updates and turning the replies into one paragraph a vendor can understand. Assembling the weekly vendor update from what's already in your CRM - the system where you keep your contacts, properties and sales, like a digital card index. Reading a week of viewing feedback and telling you that four of six viewers said the same thing about the second bedroom. That last one is easy to overlook: feedback themes are the evidence you need for a price conversation, and it's easy to leave that evidence sitting unread.

What AI won't do is win you an instruction or make a slow conveyancer faster. Everything above saves minutes, rather than giving you something new.

If chain chasing and weekly vendor updates are the jobs that eat your week, we can set up the automation that drafts them from your CRM for someone to check and send.

Why a description that reads well is exactly the risk

AI models - the engines behind tools like ChatGPT and Claude - are built to produce fluent, appealing writing. That's the same skill as gilding a listing, and the model has no idea which of its adjectives is a statement of fact.

"Recently modernised throughout" is a claim. "Moments from the station" is a claim. If neither was in your notes, the model may add them anyway, simply because the sentence reads better with something there.

Section 237 makes engaging in a practice involving a misleading action or a misleading omission an offence. The professional diligence offence in the same section requires knowledge or recklessness, but the Act sets out no such requirement for those two. Section 240 sets the penalty: on summary conviction in England and Wales, a fine; on indictment, up to two years in prison, a fine, or both.

The defence in section 238 is the part that matters for anyone using a tool. It's available where the offence was caused by the act or omission of another person, reliance on information given by another person, a mistake or accident, or a cause beyond your control - and only if you also took all reasonable precautions and exercised all due diligence. Our reading, which again is our interpretation rather than settled law, is that a model isn't "another person". It's your own tool, and what it writes is your copy. Using it to generate a description doesn't shift the responsibility, and "the software wrote it" isn't one of the listed causes.

The practical consequence is simple, if not exciting: every fact in a drafted listing needs checking against the file before it's published, and that's the part that takes the time. Drafting was never really the slow bit.

Leave identity checks to the process built for them

Estate agency businesses must register with HMRC for money laundering supervision, and it's a criminal offence to trade as an estate agency business without being registered. The trigger is estate agent activity under section 1 of the Estate Agents Act 1979, which HMRC reads broadly - sending out property details and arranging viewings is enough.

HMRC's guidance for the sector is explicit that the customer is "both the buyer(s) and the seller(s) of a property", and that identity verification under regulation 28(2)(a) and (b) of the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 must be completed before the business relationship is established. That means both sides, and before rather than during.

Electronic verification products are a normal part of this, and we're not suggesting anyone checks passports by hand. The point is narrower: the obligation sits with the registered business, and it isn't a judgement to hand to a general-purpose AI model that sounds confident about things it hasn't seen. It's sensible to automate the reminder to do the check, but not the check itself.

The current registration fees, updated for changes from 1 December 2025, are a £300 non-refundable application fee, £400 for each premises when you register and again each year, and £40 for each person put through HMRC's approval check.

What we'd suggest

Use AI for the first draft of a description, never the last. Treat every generated sentence about the property as unchecked until someone has matched it to the file, and give one named person that job rather than assuming it's been done.

Put AI to work on the correspondence instead, where the compliance risk is close to nil and the time saved is real: enquiry acknowledgements, chain chasing, vendor updates and feedback summaries. That's where a small independent agency can give buyers and vendors the same quick replies a bigger firm does.

And put a note in the diary to look out for the MHCLG guidance and Code of Practice. When they're published, your listing template will need a review, and any AI prompt or template you use for descriptions needs reviewing on the same day.

If you'd like the enquiry replies, chain chasers and reminders set up for you, there's more on what we set up for small businesses, and we're glad to talk it through.

Sources

• Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, Part 4 Chapter 1, including s.227, s.230, s.237, s.238 and s.240; Part 3 Chapter 4 for s.182 - legislation.gov.uk
• The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (Commencement No. 2) Regulations 2025 - legislation.gov.uk
• Unfair commercial practices (CMA207) - Competition and Markets Authority
• Material information in property listings - Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
• Home buying and selling reform roadmap - MHCLG
• Money laundering supervision for estate agency businesses and Fees you'll pay for money laundering supervision - HMRC
• AMLG2200: Estate Agent Business Guidance - HMRC internal manual
• Material Information guidance withdrawn - Propertymark (trade body, not a primary source; used only for the reported withdrawal)

Checked on 27 October 2026. This one is moving: MHCLG has committed to publishing material information guidance and a Code of Practice during 2026, and both will change what a compliant listing looks like. Check whether they have landed before relying on anything above.