AML and ID checks for estate agents, built into Home

Anti-money-laundering compliance is not optional for an estate agency, and it is one of the most tedious parts of the job. Home now runs AML and ID verification on your clients inside your agent dashboard, so meeting your obligations takes minutes instead of a separate login and a separate bill.

What AML asks of you

Estate agents in the UK are supervised for anti-money-laundering by HMRC, and registration is a legal requirement before you trade. In practice that means real work on every instruction, not a box you tick once a year.

You have to identify and verify both sides of a deal, the seller and the buyer, not only the person paying you. That means confirming who they are, checking their identity against reliable documents, and screening for the risk factors your policy flags. On higher-value or higher-risk transactions you are expected to establish source of funds and, where it applies, source of wealth, so you understand where the money came from and whether the story holds together. Every check has to be recorded and kept for five years, and your customer due diligence has to stay up to date rather than filed and forgotten, so a client you verified last spring may need looking at again before completion.

The friction shows up in the chain. The same buyer or seller can be re-verified by three or four firms in a single move, each one asking for the same passport and the same bank statements, each one paying for its own check. That repetition costs your team hours and costs your client patience at the exact moment you want the sale to feel calm.

How Home handles it

Verification sits in the workflow you already use. You request a check on a client, they complete ID and AML steps, and the result attaches to the deal alongside the listing and the leads, so there is nothing to re-key into a compliance tool on the side.

The part that compounds: when a client has already passed a verified check through any firm on Home, your check on that same person is approved instantly. No repeat upload for them, no credit spent by you. Home tracks 1,249,531 live UK property listings and a growing pool of verified people behind them, so the more agents run checks, the less duplicate work everyone does. If you already work in a connected CRM, the verified status travels with the deal rather than living in a folder no one opens.

Why getting it right pays off

The downside of a weak AML process is not abstract. HMRC publishes the names of estate agents it penalises, and fines for failures run into serious money, on top of the reputational damage of appearing on that list. Regulators can also act against firms that trade without registering.

The upside is quieter. Good compliance is invisible to the client and light on your team. Building it into the platform you use every day, and recognising a verified person across the network, keeps the admin down and the move from offer to completion moving.

If your agency is not set up on Home yet, that is the step before you can switch AML checks on. See how it works on the AML & ID checks page, or join as an agent.

AML and ID verification supports your compliance obligations; responsibility for compliance remains with your firm.

Further reading: the government's money laundering regulations.