EPC ratings belong in your listings, not in a folder of PDFs

Somewhere in your office there is a folder of EPC certificates. PDFs, mostly, a few of them scans of scans. Each one was filed by whoever handled that letting at the time. If somebody asks what the rating is on unit 4 of the trade park, a person has to go and look.

That works fine, right up until the week it does not.

What is settled, and what is not

Minimum energy efficiency standards already apply to commercial lettings, and the penalties are not nominal. Under the MEES regulations the fine is worked out from the property's rateable value, and it is capped at £150,000 for a non-domestic breach.

What the current minimum rating means for your particular building, and which exemptions you might be entitled to register, is a question for your surveyor or your solicitor with the actual asset in front of them. It is not a number to take off a blog post, this one included.

The 2027 and 2030 dates are proposals

You will have seen the dates going round. EPC C or better from 1 April 2027. EPC B or better from 1 April 2030. They turn up in trade headlines and in conversations at viewings, usually stated as though somebody had already signed them into law.

Nobody has. Those thresholds are at consultation stage. They are government proposals, and the 2027 date may itself slip to 2028. Until legislation is actually made, there is no commercial EPC C deadline and no commercial EPC B deadline, whatever the headline said.

That does not mean the proposals will evaporate. The direction has been consistent for years and it points one way. Be careful, though, about what you commit money to on the strength of a draft, because drafts move.

The honest gap

So there is a gap. On one side, a regime that is already law with penalties that run into six figures. On the other, a proposed tightening with dates that nobody can rely on yet. In between sits the decision every landlord with commercial stock has to make: how much to do now.

Most of the expensive answers depend on the dates. Replacing a heating system this year rather than in three is a different decision entirely, and a tired 1980s unit might warrant a full fabric upgrade or might only warrant a lighting swap. All of that turns on a timetable that does not exist.

One answer does not depend on the dates at all. Knowing the rating of every unit you own or manage, all of it in one place and sortable, is useful under every version of these rules, including the version where nothing changes for another decade.

Why the certificate should not be the record

On most property firm websites, the EPC turns up as a link at the bottom of a listing page, if it turns up at all. Sometimes it is a picture of the certificate. Sometimes it is a PDF from 2017 with the assessor's logo on it. Either way the rating exists only inside a document, and documents open one at a time.

You cannot answer the obvious question. How many of our units are below C? With ratings living in attachments, answering that means opening every file and writing numbers on a pad. So the question gets asked roughly once a year, usually only after a lender or a buyer has asked it first.

Nobody sees an expiry coming. A certificate that lapses quietly becomes a problem on the day you want to market the unit, which is the worst possible day to find out. A rating stored as a field, with its expiry date next to it, can trigger a reminder months ahead. We can build that alert. Whether anyone opens the email it sends is not something we can do for you.

The rating is something an occupier is entitled to see up front. It belongs in the listing itself, next to the rent and the floor area, alongside the other material facts a property advert now has to carry. None of this makes a firm compliant, and no website ever could. The duty sits with you and your advisers. What a decent listing system does is make the position visible, so a rating problem surfaces in a filter in March rather than in a solicitor's enquiry in September.

Making it a field

The work is unglamorous. One row per unit: current rating, assessment date, expiry date, certificate reference, and the PDF attached to that row rather than in charge of it. Once the rating is a field, the public site can filter on it and your staff can sort the portfolio worst first. The report for the bank takes a click instead of a morning.

For forty units, that is closer to an afternoon of typing than a project. It does not get easier by waiting, and the version done in a rush the week after a rule finally lands is always the expensive version.

There is a letting argument too, quite separate from the rules. Say a corporate occupier's property team is shortlisting three industrial sites, and has been told to prefer better-rated stock. Your listing shows B. The other two say "EPC available on request". You are on the shortlist while they are chasing an email. And a unit sitting off the market because nobody can find its certificate is a void like any other. It costs what every other void costs.

We build property sites where the EPC rating is a proper field, filterable by anyone on the front end and sortable by your staff in the back office. The expiry date sits beside it. Tell us roughly how many units you hold and we will send you a price.