Not an April Fools' Day joke regarding estate agent legislation

This webpage from the Department for Business Innovation and Skills popped up in my Google Alerts last week. It concerns draft legislation of formal record keeping for estate agents, expected to be introduced in 2011.

The draft legislation and guidance is dated 2009, but it is not easy to tell how well progressed discussions are. The Trading Standards Institute released a lukewarm response in September last year.

• Full details and information relating to offers (the amount, conditions, people involved, date and time of offer and means of communication)
• A history of actions relating to those offers (which staff did what, when - and what the response was)
• Agency contracts

From what I read, this largely seems like another case of common sense, particularly if you're already using a comprehensive estate agency software package, but for those agents still operating manual processes it is a burden worth planning ahead for.

I'd be interested to hear if any readers have seen or heard any more about this?

We often get enquiries from people considering starting up an estate agency, so it's also worth saying that there's a good summary factsheet of relevant legislation on the same BIS website here.