AI for UK estate agents: keep vendor and buyer details out

In most branches, AI for estate agents is nothing clever: a negotiator pasting the memorandum of sale into ChatGPT to tidy the email to both solicitors, or a sales progressor asking for a polite chaser down a chain that has stalled at searches.

The memo carries the property address, the vendor’s and buyer’s names, their mobiles and email addresses. The AML file note adds a date of birth, a passport or driving licence number and a current address. Then there is the offer letter to the vendor that has to explain why a lower bid from a buyer with no chain might be the better one, and the viewing feedback that has to be honest about the kitchen without losing the instruction.

Those are the lines Nonimo covers before anything goes to the chat. The price, the tenure, the chain and the mortgage in principle stay as you typed them, so the assistant can still write a sensible email. Choosing the assistant itself is a separate decision, and the checks a UK business runs before picking one cover it.

For estate agents, ChatGPT does the job on a memo of sale once the people in it are placeholders. In the made-up memorandum below, the property, the vendor, the buyer, both mobiles and both email addresses become stand-ins on the negotiator’s own computer before the text goes.

What the solicitors need to hear is still there: the agreed price, the tenure, a first-time buyer with nothing to sell, a mortgage in principle and ID checks done on both sides. When the draft comes back, the real names and numbers go back in on the same screen, ready to send from the branch.

The details swapped out were never sent, so the provider holds nothing of them. How OpenAI stores the rest of a conversation, and for how long, is laid out in our reading of ChatGPT’s terms.

Estate agents are relevant persons under regulation 8 of the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, supervised by HMRC, and HMRC’s guidance for the sector is plain about who the customer is: the buyer and the seller.

Identity has to be verified before the business relationship starts, which for a buyer means by exchange of contracts at the latest. HMRC even suggests the signing of the memorandum of sale as a sensible point to start those checks, so the memo and the ID documents, often a driving licence copy, land on the same desk in the same week. The sentence quoted here sets the other end: five years after completion, or after the sale falls through, the copies go.

If a passport number from that file has been pasted into an AI chat, it should be deleted there too, and your branch has no way of making sure it is. Covering it first is simpler. Placeholders do not lift the memo out of the UK GDPR, though, and what stays identifiable once the names are gone explains why.

Fitness to trade is a separate question. Under the Estate Agents Act 1979 it belongs to the National Trading Standards Estate Agency Team, run from Powys County Council, which can warn or ban people it finds unfit for estate agency work.

Most lettings work sits outside the Money Laundering Regulations, but the tenancy file is just as personal. In England, every adult tenant’s right to rent has to be checked before the tenancy starts, from an original document or, for many non-British tenants, through the Home Office online service with a share code. Landlords often hand that check to the letting agent, in writing.

GOV.UK asks for copies of the documents, or a saved copy of the online profile page, with the date of the check, kept while the tenant rents and for one year after. Add tenant referencing, with payslips, bank statements, an employer and a previous landlord, and the lettings desk ends up holding as many identity documents as the sales side. The rules on private renting in England also changed on 1 May 2026, so plenty of those files are being reworked into new letters right now.

In a made-up right to rent note, Nonimo turned the applicant’s name, date of birth, passport number and previous address into placeholders. The share code was left as typed: it is not among the details Nonimo recognises today, and the landlord’s summary only needs the outcome and the date, so leave it out of the paste. Better one line deleted by hand than a code with the provider.

Plenty of AI tools for estate agents are on the market; Nonimo sits in front of whichever assistant the office already uses, starting on one Mac or Windows PC in the branch.

Sales progression and lettings usually go first, since that is where memos, references and right to rent notes pile up; valuers follow.

For a group with several branches, your IT support rolls out a browser extension through policy that covers text going into the AI tools without anyone pressing a key, as the organisations page explains. Your AML records and right to rent copies stay in your own systems.