CDD on vendors AND purchasers: what the rules ask of estate agents

If your firm sells property in Ireland, you already know the awkward conversation. The vendor signed your letter of engagement, so identifying them feels natural. Then a purchaser appears with an offer, and someone in the office asks: do we really need to run checks on them too? They are not our client. Their solicitor will do it anyway. Why risk annoying the person about to pay our fee?

The answer matters more now than it has in years. Estate agents, letting agents and auctioneers have been "designated persons" under the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Act 2010 since long before most current staff joined the industry, with the Property Services Regulatory Authority (PSRA) acting as the sector's AML competent authority. And from 10 July 2027, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 (the AMLR) — a directly applicable EU regulation — replaces the substantive rulebook your current procedures were written for. Practices that grew up around the 2010 Act need to be looked at fresh.

Here is what customer due diligence (CDD) on both sides of a transaction should look like, and what to start adjusting now.

Why both sides of the deal are your problem

Property is a classic route for laundering funds: large values, a legitimate-looking asset at the end, and several professionals involved who can each assume someone else is doing the checking. That last point is the trap. The purchaser's solicitor running their own CDD does not discharge your firm's obligations, any more than your checks discharge theirs.

In a typical sale, your firm has a relationship with the vendor from instruction, and it facilitates the transaction with the purchaser once an offer is accepted. Both sides need due diligence in your file, done to your firm's standard, on your firm's risk assessment. A file that shows a certified copy of the vendor's passport and nothing at all on the purchaser tells a PSRA inspector one thing very clearly: this firm treats CDD as paperwork for the client it invoices, not as a control against money laundering.

What CDD actually involves — for each party

Strip away the jargon and CDD for a property transaction comes down to four repeatable steps, applied to vendor and purchaser alike:

1. Identify the person. Collect name, date of birth and address, and verify them against reliable, independent documents or data. For individuals that usually means photographic ID plus proof of address; the AMLR also explicitly recognises eIDAS-aligned electronic identification, which puts properly configured electronic verification on a firmer footing than ever.
2. Identify the beneficial owners where the party is a company, partnership or other structure. Under the AMLR the harmonised test is an ownership interest of 25 per cent or more, direct or indirect. Ask for the ownership picture, then check it — do not simply file whatever the client asserts.
3. Understand the purpose and nature of the transaction. For a vendor: how did they come to own the property, and does the instruction make sense? For a purchaser: what is the stated source of funds — mortgage, savings, sale of another property, a gift — and is it plausible for this person and this price?
4. Apply your risk assessment. A local owner-occupier trading up is not the same risk as an overseas company buying through a layered structure, or a purchaser proposing to complete quickly in cash. Higher risk means enhanced due diligence and more evidence; it never means quietly skipping steps.

For corporate parties there is an additional Irish-specific step: since April 2021, designated persons must obtain an extract from the Register of Beneficial Ownership (rbo.gov.ie) before entering a new business relationship, and must report discrepancies between what the register says and what your own checks find. Your firm needs designated-person access to the RBO (via the BEN3A1 form) and a documented habit of comparing the extract against the ownership information the client gave you — and recording the outcome, even when everything matches.

What changes on 10 July 2027

The AMLR keeps the shape of CDD but tightens several settings your current procedures probably still have at the old values:

• Occasional-transaction threshold drops to 10,000 euro, from 15,000 euro, for when CDD is triggered outside an established business relationship.
• Occasional cash transactions of 3,000 euro or more trigger limited CDD in their own right.
• An EU-wide cash payment cap of 10,000 euro applies to commercial transactions, single or linked. If anyone in a deal proposes cash near that level, your firm needs to recognise the issue on the spot — booking deposits included.
• Beneficial ownership at 25 per cent or more becomes the harmonised EU-wide test, with the Commission able to lower it (to as little as 15 per cent) for high-risk sectors following a review due by 2029.
• Prescribed compliance roles: a board-level compliance manager plus a compliance officer of sufficiently high standing, with the compliance officer also responsible for targeted financial sanctions implementation from 10 July 2027.
• Records kept for five years, then deleted — retention and deletion, not retention forever.

One thing that does not change: Ireland has no threshold transaction reporting regime, and the AMLR does not create one. What you do have is the Suspicious Transaction Report. If CDD on either party surfaces genuine suspicion, Irish STRs are dual-reported — to FIU Ireland via the goAML portal (fiu-ireland.ie) and to the Revenue Commissioners via ROS. Your MLRO should be registered on both before they are ever needed in anger.

Handling the friction with purchasers

The commercial worry is real: nobody wants to lose a sale over paperwork. Three things help.

• Set expectations early. Tell bidders at offer stage that anti-money laundering checks apply to the successful purchaser before sale-agreed paperwork issues. Framed as standard procedure applying to everyone, almost nobody objects.
• Make it fast. Electronic identity verification turns a days-long document chase into minutes. The eIDAS recognition in the AMLR is your friend here.
• Never treat the other side's checks as yours. By all means note that solicitors are also involved — but your file must stand on its own.

What to do now

1. Pull three recent sale files and check honestly: is there completed CDD for the purchaser as well as the vendor, to the same standard?
2. Update your CDD procedure to name both vendors and purchasers explicitly, with a defined trigger point for purchaser checks.
3. Confirm your firm has RBO designated-person access, and that the extract-and-compare step is actually happening for corporate parties.
4. Reset your thresholds for the AMLR: 10,000 euro occasional transactions, 3,000 euro occasional cash, the 10,000 euro cash cap.
5. Designate your compliance manager and compliance officer roles ahead of 10 July 2027.
6. Confirm goAML and Revenue ROS registrations for your MLRO.
7. Refresh your business-wide risk assessment so vendor-side and purchaser-side risks are both addressed.

Where CompliDesk fits

CompliDesk Ireland is being built AMLR-native for PSRA-licensed firms: guided CDD on both sides of a transaction, RBO extract workflows, cash-rule warnings and an audit-ready file for every deal. If you are not certain which of your activities are caught, start with our two-minute scope check.