Insight
How do you check a property sourcer is legitimate before you pay them anything?
Ask for five things, and verify every one of them yourself rather than taking their word for it: their Companies House registration, their professional indemnity insurance certificate, their redress scheme membership number, their ICO data protection registration, and evidence that they are registered with HMRC for anti money laundering supervision.
All five can be checked on public registers, and the whole exercise takes about fifteen minutes. Do it before any money moves. Sourcing property for other people without the correct registrations is a criminal offence, and a good number of people in this business are doing exactly that.
Why this matters more than experience
The instinct is to ask how long somebody has been doing this and how many deals they have done. That is a reasonable question, but it is the wrong one to lead with, because it is unverifiable and easily embellished.
Registrations are different. They are held by third parties, they appear on public registers, and they either exist or they do not. A newly established sourcer with all five in place is a safer person to deal with than an experienced one who is missing two of them, because the missing registrations tell you something about how the whole operation is run.
Compliance is a better signal than years of trading, because you can actually check it.
The five checks
Companies House
Ask how they trade: as an individual, a partnership, or a limited company. If they say limited company, look the company up on the Companies House register. You are confirming that the legal name matches what appears on their website and their invoices, and that the company is actually registered and active rather than dissolved.
Ask"What is the registered company name and number, and does that match the name on the invoice you will send me?"
Professional indemnity insurance
Ask for a copy of the certificate. You are looking for two things: a meaningful level of cover, with at least one hundred thousand pounds usually treated as the floor rather than the target, and wording that explicitly covers property sourcing or deal packaging rather than some adjacent activity.
No professional indemnity cover is a serious warning. It means that if their work is negligent, there is nothing behind them.
Ask"Can you send me your professional indemnity certificate, and does the cover extend to sourcing and packaging?"
Redress scheme membership
Anyone doing estate agency type work, which includes sourcing, must belong to a government approved redress scheme. In practice that means either the Property Redress Scheme or The Property Ombudsman.
Ask which one and for the membership number, then check the business name on that scheme's own public register. This is not administrative box ticking. Charging fees while operating without redress scheme membership sits in criminal territory under the estate agency rules.
Ask"Which redress scheme are you a member of, and what is your membership number?"
ICO data protection registration
If they hold your personal information, and they will, because they will be holding your name, your email address and probably copies of your identity documents, they should be registered with the Information Commissioner's Office.
Ask for the registration number and search the ICO register for the business name. A sourcing business holding personal data with no ICO registration is skipping a basic obligation, which tells you what else might be getting skipped.
Ask"What is your ICO registration number?"
HMRC anti money laundering supervision
Charging fees for arranging property transactions brings a business under anti money laundering supervision with HMRC. Ask whether they are registered and for the reference number.
Then watch what they do to you. A properly run business will insist on seeing photo identification, proof of your address, and evidence of where your money has come from, and will not provide services until those checks are complete. If somebody is happy to take your fee without ever asking who you are or where the money came from, they are not doing this properly, and that should worry you rather than please you.
Ask"Are you registered with HMRC for anti money laundering supervision, and what checks will you be running on me?"
Then check the human things
Once the registrations stand up, ask for references from previous investors and actually ring one of them. Not to hear that the sourcer is a nice person, but to ask specific questions: did the valuation, the rent and the refurbishment figures hold up in reality? How was the communication when something went wrong, because something always does? When exactly was the fee paid, and were there any surprises?
Read the paperwork before you pay
Insist on a written agreement that sets out what they will actually do, how and when you pay, whether that is on reservation or on completion, and what happens to your money if the deal collapses for reasons that are nothing to do with you.
One clause deserves particular attention. If they are being paid by the seller as well as by you, that must be disclosed to you. A fee coming from both sides of a transaction is not automatically wrong, but it changes whose interests are being served, and you are entitled to know.
And do not outsource the deal itself to them. Whoever packaged it, check the valuation against real comparable sales, check the rental figure against live local listings and a letting agent, and check the refurbishment budget against a builder's quote. Their fee depends on you buying. That does not make them dishonest, it makes them interested, and interested people should be verified.
The points at which you should walk away
- They cannot or will not produce any one of the five registrations.
- They treat your questions about compliance as an irritation, or describe it as "just paperwork".
- They are keen to take money up front but vague about the contract and about what protects you.
- They never run identity or source of funds checks on you, or suggest skipping them.
- They discourage you from speaking to previous investors.
Any one of those is enough. You are not being difficult by asking. You are doing the thing that a competent operator will respect you for.
Applying this to me
It would be a strange article that told you to run these checks and then asked you to make an exception. So, plainly: I hold anti money laundering supervision with HMRC, registered in December 2025. I am a member of the Property Redress Scheme. I have been registered with the ICO since 2024. I carry one hundred thousand pounds of professional indemnity cover. PathForge is a trading name of PSE3 Ltd, company number 15845792, registered at Companies House.
Ask me for the numbers and I will send them without you having to chase, and you should check every one against the registers rather than believing this page. I would also tell you the honest thing that most people in my position leave out, which is that I am early in this: I have been at it properly for two years and I have not yet completed a purchase of my own. You can read the fuller version of that on my main page, where I have written it out rather than waiting to be asked.
This article is general information about the checks available to you, not legal or financial advice, and it is not a statement about anyone's compliance including my own. Requirements in this area change. Confirm the current position with a solicitor, or directly with the relevant register, before you rely on any of it or part with any money.