An omission is the defect.

Most listing advice treats a weak description as the problem. On a property listing it usually is not. The problem is a blank field. Leaving material information out of an invitation to purchase is unfair in itself under section 230 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 — whether or not it changed anybody's mind. So this tool reads for absence first and prose second.

It is worth knowing that almost every article you will find online about this describes a regime that no longer exists. The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 were repealed on 6 April 2025, and National Trading Standards withdrew all three parts of its Material Information guidance in May 2025 because the law underneath them had gone. The duty did not soften; enforcement moved to the Competition and Markets Authority, which can now decide a breach directly. The A/B/C checklist survives as the shape of the portals' own fields, which is why this tool still walks it — but it walks it as a field list, not as a citation.

Who is actually typing this

Two people, mostly, and neither of them is a portal. A private landlord cannot put a property on Rightmove directly — the portals take listings from agents — so a landlord doing it themselves is almost always writing into OpenRent or a similar online agent, with the same required fields waiting at the end of it and nobody in the office to catch a blank one. The other is a seller or landlord who has been sent an agent's draft particulars to approve, which is the last moment anyone reads them before they go live, and the only moment a missing tenure or an expired certificate is cheap to fix. This works for both: it reads the text, not the platform.

The gaps it looks for by name

Price or rent and its qualifier. Tenure — freehold, leasehold, share of freehold, commonhold, shared ownership, non-traditional — which Zoopla makes a required field with its own dropdown. Council tax band. EPC rating, which has to appear in the advertisement once a certificate exists. Lease years, ground rent, service charge and each one's review period. Then the six fields Rightmove rolled out in May 2024: parking, accessibility, utilities, rights and restrictions, listed status and flood risk. Plus construction type where it is non-standard, because that is what decides whether a buyer can get a mortgage.

Where listings go wrong

• Tenure inferred from the property type. "It's a flat, so it's leasehold" is wrong often enough to be dangerous — share of freehold and commonhold both exist.
• Council tax band inferred from the asking price. Bands come off 1991 values in England and Scotland, 2003 in Wales. Today's price tells you nothing. It is free to look up and takes a minute.
• Old particulars reused. The lease is two years shorter than it was, the service charge has risen, and a ten-year EPC has quietly expired.
• A known negative euphemised. "In need of some modernisation" for damp. If you disclose damp, the rewrite says damp — softening your honesty into a vague phrase would turn it into something worse.
• Lettings wording that has aged out. Inviting offers over the advertised rent, "no DSS", "professionals only", a six-week deposit, two months up front.
• Claims about somebody else's future decision. Guaranteed school places, achievable planning permission, a yield.

What a fix looks like

Three things happened there. Two figures came down to their caps. Two blanks were named rather than filled. And the discriminatory line did not just disappear from the copy — it came back as the first-ranked issue, because a landlord who never learns why it went will write it again next time.