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"This goes beyond conditional selling": Brokers urge borrowers to be wary of fire safety shortcuts

ended 30. May 2025

Brokers have warned consumers to be wary of estate agents pressuring them to make fire safety shortcuts when buying a property.

Craig Fish, Director at London-based broker, Lodestone, has been helping a client buy a flat that required an EWS1 certificate — a tool used by lenders to assess the fire safety of a building's external wall system — only to discover that the certificate in question was issued by a firm at the centre of a major forgery scandal.

When the source of the certificate was identified, the mortgage lender would understandably not complete without a valid fire safety certificate in place, leaving the buyer in limbo and the transaction on hold.

The agent selling the property then suggested the buyer use one of their “preferred” brokers who would be able to secure a mortgage without requiring the certificate at all. Fish said: “This is not just unethical, it’s outright dangerous. We’re talking about forged fire safety certificates, and yet some estate agents are pushing buyers to switch brokers just to find one who’ll ignore the need for valid documentation. Why? To close a deal and earn commission. It’s a reckless gamble with people’s lives. Lenders rightly won’t touch a property without a legitimate EWS1 form, especially given the fallout from Grenfell and ongoing cladding scandals. Bypassing that process isn’t just bending the rules, it’s putting future residents at serious risk. This goes beyond conditional selling. It exposes a deep flaw in the system where estate agents can act with no oversight. If this isn’t a wake-up call for regulation, I don’t know what is. It’s time the industry stopped turning a blind eye to this behaviour and started putting safety and ethics first.”

Views from other brokers and property experts below.

5 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Craig Fish
Director at Lodestone Mortgages
This is not just unethical, it’s outright dangerous. We’re talking about forged fire safety certificates, and yet some estate agents are pushing buyers to switch brokers just to find one who’ll ignore the need for valid documentation. Why? To close a deal and earn commission. It’s a reckless gamble with people’s lives. Lenders rightly won’t touch a property without a legitimate EWS1 form, especially given the fallout from Grenfell and ongoing cladding scandals. Bypassing that process isn’t just bending the rules, it’s putting future residents at serious risk.
This goes beyond conditional selling. It exposes a deep flaw in the system where estate agents can act with no oversight. If this isn’t a wake-up call for regulation, I don’t know what is. It’s time the industry stopped turning a blind eye to this behaviour and started putting safety and ethics first.
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Emma Jones
Managing Director at Whenthebanksaysno.co.uk
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this happen and, unfortunately, it is unlikely to be the last. The forging of EWS1 and fire safety certificates is a serious issue with potentially dangerous consequences. I firmly believe that estate agents should be fully regulated and held to consistent professional standards. The risks to public safety and consumers are simply too high to allow gaps in accountability.
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Justin Moy
Managing Director at EHF Mortgages
Leasehold properties have become less appealing to buy over the past decade, and this is one of the most serious reasons. We have seen a number of problems with fire certificates. Lenders are very mixed with how they assess these documents, which doesn’t help the situation, and it’s more difficult when agents start to tell you which lenders are better than others on these properties.
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Michelle Lawson
Director at Lawson Financial
The regulation of estate agents is long overdue. They're the only party in a property transaction that isn’t regulated. Buyers and vendors often hang on every word they say as buying a property is so emotive, and they know it and take advantage of this just to meet the bottom line. Many have no idea of the process and changing brokers or lenders won’t change the legal outcome. Putting buyers in such a dangerous situation is deeply unethical as well as potentially fraudulent.
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Kundan Bhaduri
Entrepreneur, Investor and Landlord at The Kushman Group
Over the years, I've witnessed some spectacular regulatory failures, but estate agents conditional selling against fire safety checks takes the proverbial biscuit. The Adam Kiziak scandal has left 410 flats effectively worthless overnight, with Tri Fire's dodgy certificates affecting properties throughout the UK. Pressuring buyers to switch to brokers who'll turn a blind eye to missing EWS1 forms is simply not acceptable. Post-Grenfell, we spent £5.1 billion on remediation to prevent another tragedy, yet here we are watching cowboys treat fire safety like an optional extra. The solution isn't rocket science: the FCA must immediately extend oversight to estate agents' financial activities, we need a centralised EWS1 database to prevent certificate recycling, and condional selling penalties should start at £100,000 per offence. That will fix it for good.