A property listing is a sales document. It is written by someone the seller pays, and it is written to get you through the door. That does not make it dishonest. It makes it incomplete in a specific and predictable way: it tells you what is good about the property, it tells you the facts the rules require, and it says nothing at all about the things that are only visible from outside the listing.
Since 2022, National Trading Standards has required agents to publish a defined set of material information. Part A covers the asking price, council tax band and tenure. Part B covers property type, construction materials, rooms, utilities and parking. Part C covers the issues that affect only some properties, including flood risk, restrictive covenants and known building safety problems. It is a real improvement, and it closed several of the worst gaps.
It did not close the gap this guide is about. The rules govern what an agent must publish about the property being sold. They say nothing about the street, the neighbours, the planning file, or the future.
The four things a listing structurally cannot tell you
What is happening next door
The listing describes one address. Planning applications on the properties around it are a matter of public record, held by the local planning authority, and nobody involved in your purchase is required to look at them. A neighbour's approved two-storey side extension does not appear in the particulars, and it will not appear in your solicitor's local authority search either, because the standard CON29 enquiries relate to the property you are buying and not to the plot next to it.
This is the single most common surprise for buyers, and it is entirely avoidable. Checking the planning history on a property and its street takes about twenty minutes.
What has already been refused
A planning refusal on the property is a fact about what you will be allowed to do with it. If the loft conversion you are mentally pricing was refused for the same house in 2019 on daylight grounds, that is worth knowing before you offer, not after. Refusals sit in the same public register as approvals, and no seller has any reason to volunteer them.
The same register tells you whether work already done was ever approved. An extension built without permission is not automatically a problem: in England, the council's window to enforce is now ten years for all breaches, up from four for building work completed before 25 April 2024. But an unapproved extension with no lawful development certificate is something your lender's valuer may notice, and it is a negotiating point either way.
What the tenure actually costs
"Leasehold, 89 years remaining" is a compliant, accurate, and nearly useless line. Ninety years is comfortable. Eighty is a cliff edge, because below eighty the premium to extend jumps by the amount lawyers call marriage value. Seventy is where a good number of lenders stop lending, which changes who can buy the flat from you later.
Ground rent works the same way. A listing that says "ground rent £250" does not say whether it doubles every ten years, and a doubling clause is the difference between a nuisance and an unsaleable flat. What a short lease actually means when you buy works through the numbers and the current state of leasehold reform.
What the ground does when it rains
Flood risk is now Part C material information, so a listing for a property in a recognised flood zone should say so. Two things get missed anyway.
The first is surface water. It is the most common form of flooding in the UK, it has nothing to do with being near a river, and it does not appear on the flood map planners use. The second is that "flood risk" as a phrase covers a range from a one in a thousand year chance to a one in thirty year chance, and those two properties are not in the same situation when you go to insure them.
How to check flood risk before buying a house covers the official checkers for each UK country and what the ratings mean for a mortgage.
The rest of the list
Beyond the four above, these come up often enough to be worth a look on any property:
| What is missing | Where it actually lives |
|---|---|
| What comparable homes on the street sold for | HM Land Registry Price Paid data, Registers of Scotland north of the border |
| Recent crime on the street | police.uk, by street and month |
| The real broadband speed at the address | Ofcom's address checker, not the postcode average quoted in listings |
| School catchments and Ofsted ratings | The local authority's admissions data and the Ofsted register |
| Whether the loft conversion has a completion certificate | Building control records at the council, separate from planning |
| What the council tax bill is in cash | The Valuation Office Agency band, then the council's rate for the year |
| Whether it is in a conservation area or has an Article 4 direction | The council's planning policy map. Both remove permitted development rights |
None of this is hidden. All of it is free. The problem is that it is spread across a dozen bodies with a dozen interfaces, several of which want a postcode in a format the others do not use, and doing it properly for one property takes a couple of hours.
Why the timing matters more than the information
Here is the part that costs people money. Almost every formal check in a UK purchase happens after your offer is accepted.
Your solicitor orders conveyancing searches once you are under offer. The local authority search alone runs from two days to eight weeks depending on the council. A survey is booked after that. So the sequence for most buyers is: fall for a property, offer on it, wait three weeks, and only then start learning things that might have changed the offer.
By that point you have spent money, you have told people you are moving, and you are negotiating from a position where walking away feels like a loss. The facts have not changed. Your ability to act on them has.
Everything on this page is public before you offer. That is the whole argument for doing it early.
Doing it yourself, or not
Each of the guides linked above walks through one check by hand, with the official sources and what the results mean. They are written so you can do the work yourself, because you can.
If you would rather not do it twelve times for twelve listings, that is what we built Rooph for. You paste a listing URL and we run the checks in this guide against that address, then hand back one report with the sources named. It costs less than a single conveyancing search and arrives before you offer rather than after.
See a full sample report to judge whether it tells you anything the listing did not.