Real estate agency website: the mandatory data in listings

Anyone searching «real estate agency website: the mandatory data in listings» has usually already grasped that publishing a property online is not just about photos and an appealing description: there is a technical data point the law requires, and many agencies forget it precisely when a listing moves off an industry portal and onto their own website. Article 6, paragraph 8, of Italian legislative decree 19 August 2005, no. 192, in the text rewritten by law 90/2013, requires that every sale or rental listing, published through any commercial means of communication, state the energy performance indices of the building envelope and the overall building, together with the corresponding energy class: a requirement that also applies to an agency's own website, not just to real estate portals, and whose violation carries an administrative fine from 500 to 3,000 euros.

A necessary premise: this is not legal advice, and does not replace the opinion of a qualified technician or a consultant specialized in energy certification. It is a reading of public legal texts, useful for understanding the subject before writing a property listing.

Where the requirement comes from, and why in two stages

The first version of this requirement dates to legislative decree 3 March 2011, no. 28, which transposed a European directive on renewable energy and introduced a paragraph 2-quater into Article 6 of decree 192/2005: it covered only sale offers, in force from 1 January 2012, and carried no specific fine for ignoring it. Decree-law 4 June 2013, no. 63, converted with amendments by law 3 August 2013, no. 90, rewrote Article 6: the new paragraph 8 extended the requirement to rentals as well, and a new paragraph 10 of Article 15 introduced the administrative fine still in force today (sources checked on 24 October 2026).

What a listing has to show

Paragraph 8 asks for two distinct things: the energy performance indices, the building envelope one and the overall one, which also covers heating, cooling and the other consumption figures the certificate reports, and the corresponding energy class, the letter from A4 to G that summarizes those indices. The national guidelines attached to the ministerial decree of 26 June 2015 set a standard graphic format for this data, the colored bar label seen on physical signs or in agency windows, but the same decree explicitly excludes internet and print listings from that graphic format: a listing on a website only needs the indices and the class written as text, with no graphic required.

It also applies to the agency's own website, not just to portals

This is where agencies most often trip up. Paragraph 8 does not mention real estate portals: it covers listings published «through any commercial means of communication», a wording that reaches any channel used to promote a sale or rental, from a window sign to the agency's own website to social media. An agency that feeds listings from its management software into industry portals, where the energy class field is often required just to publish at all, and then republishes the same property on its own site without that data, because the listing template does not include it or because nobody checked, is exposed on that second publication exactly as it would be on a printed listing.

The exceptions

Two cases fall outside the requirement. The first is rentals of residential buildings used for less than four months a year, the category of seasonal holiday homes. The second is buildings and units that national law already excludes from the general obligation to hold an energy performance certificate: if a property does not need the certificate, its listing does not need the indices either.

What is at stake

The fine is set by Article 15, paragraph 10, of the same decree: from 500 to 3,000 euros, charged to whoever is responsible for the listing. Who that is, in practice, when the listing runs on an agency's own website, is not something the law states explicitly: there is no statutory list naming the agency, the owner, or both jointly. In practice, the agency that actually writes and publishes the listing on its own site is treated as responsible for that specific publication, because it controls what appears in the published text, even when the missing data depends on information the owner failed to provide in time.

Some regions add further detail

The national rule is a common baseline, not the only source: some regions have their own energy-certification regulations that spell out a listing's content in more detail. In Tuscany, for instance, regional regulation 17/R of 2023 requires stating the renewable and non-renewable indices separately and, when the certificate was submitted through the regional information system, its identification number as well. Before publishing, it is worth checking whether a region has a similar rule: paragraph 8 sets a national floor, not a ceiling.

Where to start

If your agency's website does not yet show this data, it is not the only requirement worth checking: VAT number, registered office and business register entry follow their own rules, which I cover in VAT number, registered office, business register: the mandatory data on your company website. If instead you are more interested in how the real estate sector is using artificial intelligence to sell more, with figures worth reading carefully, I wrote about that in artificial intelligence and real estate agencies: an Italian case read with caution. If you would like to talk through how to structure your website's property listings around this requirement, get in touch: I do not replace the advice of a qualified energy-certification technician, but I can help you build the rest of the listing around that data point.