Brocade
TL;DR: When a flat sale stalls on building safety evidence, the useful question is not whether the building is compliant but which specific document is missing, and which of seven parties holds it. This post walks the nine evidence areas a lender or insurer actually asks about, names who can own each blocker, and sets out what a leaseholder and a building safety consultant can each reasonably expect. Brocade renders this as a page; the reasoning works with or without the software.
Look up EWS1 and the other terms in our glossary →
The question nobody answers
A buyer's lender asks for an EWS1 form. The seller asks the managing agent. The managing agent says the freeholder holds it. The freeholder says it was the developer's responsibility. Six weeks pass. The buyer walks.
Nobody in that chain lied. They each answered a different question from the one that was asked. The buyer's lender did not want to know whether the building is safe, or whether everyone is doing their best. It wanted one document, or a defensible reason there is not one.
The reason this happens so reliably is that asking whether a building is compliant has no answerable form. It is a summary of a summary. The questions underneath it are specific, they have owners, and almost nobody writes them down in one place.
What is actually being asked
A lender or insurer is asking about evidence in nine areas. Brocade renders them as nine rows, and each row is in one of four states: satisfied, blocking, soft flag, or no evidence recorded.
- External wall evidence — the EWS1 or FRAEW position for the building
- Remediation funding path — whether the building sits on a funded scheme
- BSA certificates — the Building Safety Act certificate position
- Remediation state — planned, in progress, or complete
- FRA currency and actions — is the fire risk assessment in date, and are its actions closed
- Interim measures — waking watch, alarms, and what is in place meanwhile
- Systems evidence — the servicing and testing record for life-safety systems
- Insurance record and FSRF placement — the current placement and its renewal position
- Post-works warranties and completion documents — what exists after works finished
The important property is that no evidence recorded is a distinct state from satisfied and from blocking. A building where nobody has ever looked is not the same as a building that has been looked at and found clear, and a system that renders those two identically is not telling you anything. That conflation is what turns a stalled sale into six weeks of email.
Every blocker has exactly one owner
This is the part that turns a grievance into an action. Brocade tags each blocker with one of seven parties:
- Freeholder or landlord
- RMC or RTM directors
- Managing agent
- Developer
- Assessor or competent person
- Broker
- Leaseholders
Seven, fixed. Not a free-text field, and not a contact record. The point is not to allocate blame; it is that a blocker with no named owner is a complaint, and a blocker with an owner is a request you can send to someone.
Note the last entry. Leaseholders are on that list. Sometimes the thing holding up a building's evidence position is a leaseholder-side item, and a system that could only ever point outward would be a marketing tool rather than an honest one.
If you are the leaseholder
You are usually the person with the most at stake and the least access. Three things are worth knowing.
Ask which of the nine, not whether it is compliant. Asking whether the building is compliant invites an assurance. Which of the external wall evidence, the FRA currency, or the remediation state is currently blocking a lender? invites a document. The second question is harder to answer vaguely, which is the point.
Ask who owns it, and expect a name of a role. If the answer is that the freeholder holds the external wall assessment, that is a different next step from the assessor not having been appointed yet. Both are legitimate answers. It is in hand is not, because it cannot be checked and it does not tell you when.
Separate the document from the building. A missing EWS1 is not a finding that your building is dangerous. It is the absence of a piece of paper that a lender uses to avoid making an assumption. Buildings with no cladding at all have failed sales this way. Knowing which of the two you are dealing with changes whether you wait or push.
What none of this gives you is a right of access. This post is about knowing what to ask for and who to ask, not about what you are entitled to receive, which depends on your lease and on where the current reforms land.
If you are the consultant who signs it
The seven-owner list has an entry for assessor or competent person, and if you are a building safety consultant, that is you. Two things follow that matter more for your professional exposure than for anyone else's convenience.
Your judgement is recorded as at a date, under the guidance in force on that date. RICS published the second edition of its secured lending standard for multi-storey residential buildings with cladding on 12 May 2026, effective 1 November 2026. An assessment made under the earlier edition keeps its status in Brocade and gains a re-assessment-due flag. It is not silently recalculated under the new edition and presented as though you had signed it that way.
That is a deliberate design decision rather than an incidental one. A system that re-scores held evidence whenever its rules change is a system that can retroactively make your signed work look wrong, and you would have no way to show what you actually assessed. Flagging change and preserving the original are different behaviours, and only one of them is safe to put a professional name to.
The status cannot be set by hand. There is no field where someone marks the building acceptable. Setting the remediation state to complete without a completion certificate or a post-works FRAEW on file produces a blocker asking for the completion evidence rather than moving the status. That constraint protects you as much as anyone: it means nobody downstream can present a favourable position that your evidence does not support.
If you are the director or the managing agent
You are the one who gets asked the original question, usually by someone whose sale is collapsing. The useful shift is to stop treating it as a question about the building's character and start treating it as nine questions about documents, each with an owner and an answer that can be checked.
The uncomfortable version of this is that a specific answer is auditable and a general assurance is not. That is the trade. It is also, in our experience, the thing that ends the six-week email chain.
What this does not do
It is not a valuation, an insurance quote, or a substitute for an EWS1. It does not tell you a building is mortgageable or safe, and promissory wording is blocked by an automated test that sweeps the module's copy for exactly those terms. It does not create a right of access to any document. It does not assign work, chase anyone, or notify an owner that a blocker has their name on it; the surface is read-only today.
And it cannot tell you who manages a building that has not told it. That is not a modest disclaimer. When we asked the Building Safety Regulator, under FOIA, for a breakdown of registered higher-risk buildings by whether they are self-managed or run by a professional managing agent, the answer was that no information is held. The regulator records the Principal Accountable Person type and not the management arrangement. Software downstream of a record that does not exist cannot invent it.
Further reading
- Insurability: what your building's lending and insurance evidence actually says — how the statuses are derived, for the people running the building
- The BSR has refused 31 of 37 decided RTM Building Assessment Certificate applications — primary-source FOI data on certificate outcomes
- Golden Thread guide