How we value a property

HM Land Registry Price Paid Data

Every residential sale in England and Wales registered since 1995, published monthly under the Open Government Licence. It gives us this property's own sale history, its type (detached, semi-detached, terraced or flat) and its location. Where the same sale is reported twice by the Land Registry's two collection processes we keep one copy; a standalone additional entry — a repossession, or a corporate or buy-to-let transfer — is kept as the only record of that sale. A property with no sale on record gets no estimate.

UK House Price Index

Produced jointly by HM Land Registry, the Office for National Statistics, Registers of Scotland and Land & Property Services Northern Ireland. It reports an average price and an index for each region, broken down by property type, for every month back to the 1990s. It is published around two months in arrears, also under the Open Government Licence.

Addresses

The address list you search is built from the Price Paid Data itself. Stede holds nothing else about a property: no floor area, no condition, no photographs, no listing history and no personal data.

Both datasets are refreshed twice a month, a few days after the government republishes them.

A property's type is taken from its most recent sale record. Its region is its town, when the index has an unbroken monthly series for it — otherwise its district, otherwise its county. The valuation and the value-over-time chart always use the same regional series, so the two never disagree about where the property sits.

The confidence score reflects one thing only: how recent the property's most recent sale is. A sale in the current year scores close to 100%; a sale in 2000 or earlier scores 0; the years in between scale evenly. Scores of 75 and above are shown as High, 40 and above as Medium, and anything lower as Low.

It does not take account of how many times the property has sold, how volatile the local market is, or how typical the property is for its area. It tells you how much weight to put on the estimate — not which way prices are heading next.

The line on the chart applies the first method's calculation to every month of the regional index, back to the property's earliest recorded sale (and never before 2000). Earlier sales are plotted at the price they actually changed hands for. The final point, today's estimate, blends both methods, so it can sit a little off the line.

Because it works only from recorded sale prices and a regional index, the estimate is blind to a great deal:

• the property's condition, layout and interior
• its floor area, plot size and aspect
• extensions, conversions and planning permission granted since the last sale
• leasehold terms — remaining lease length, ground rent, service charges, cladding
• differences between one street or block and the regional average
• what buyers are paying right now, ahead of the published data
• incentives bundled into a new-build's first sale
• errors in the underlying public records, which pass straight through

It is not a RICS valuation, a Home Report or a mortgage valuation, and should not be relied on for lending or legal purposes. For a figure you can act on, instruct a chartered surveyor.