Estate agent in PL
What this register publishes today, what is missing, and the smallest change that would move it up.
What was found
The only entry in the index that records a register being deleted, which makes it the closest thing anyone has to a controlled experiment. On 1 January 2014 the central registers of estate agents and property managers lost legal force and were closed by operation of law, pending licence applications were discontinued, and every requirement went with them: the licence, the clean criminal record, the relevant education, the supervised placement. Professional liability was removed too, leaving an agent answerable only in court. What survived in statute is compulsory liability insurance. Industry federations immediately launched their own competing voluntary registers, one of them publishing the insurer’s name and the sum insured. The state is now moving the other way: a central register of property managers run by the minister, with entry required in order to practise, on the stated ground that deregulation in property produced negative effects, and similar requirements are being considered for agents. Twelve years is long enough to see what a missing public record costs.
What it publishes
| Check | Answer | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| A public page per licence | No | Gives a reader something to look at and a checker something to archive and attest against. |
| A bulk export | No | Lets a consumer hold the whole list instead of fetching one licence at a time, and lets anyone hash it. |
| Machine readable | No | A CSV or JSON rather than a page built for a browser. Decides whether checking can be automated at all. |
| Signed | No | Makes the file impossible to forge or mirror convincingly. Nothing reaches grade A without it. |
The next step
Publish anything at all
There is no public way to check a licence in this jurisdiction, so a client has nothing to compare a claim against. The first step is a page per licence at an address that does not change. A bulk file can come later.
A grade describes a register, not the authority behind it and not the quality of its supervision. An authority can run an excellent register and still sit at grade D because it is a search form.
If this row is wrong, it gets corrected with the correction published beside it. The index is useful only if it can be argued with. Tell the lab.