Property market — methodology

1. Data sources, licence & cadence

The property market section of a Home-Checker report draws on two official UK datasets: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data for historic transaction prices, and the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) for council tax band information.

1.1 HM Land Registry — Price Paid Data (PPD)

Data provided: Every residential sale in England and Wales lodged for registration with HM Land Registry, including price paid, date of transfer, property type (Detached / Semi / Terraced / Flat / Other), new-build flag, tenure (freehold / leasehold), and the address components (PAON, SAON, street, locality, town, postcode).
Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0.
Attribution: Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Refresh cadence: HM Land Registry publishes a monthly update on or around the 20th of each month, covering sales completed up to the end of the previous month. We re-load the cumulative dataset within a week of each release.
Last imported: April 2026 release (covers transactions to end of March 2026).

1.2 Valuation Office Agency — council tax bands

Data provided: The annual council tax charge for each band (A–H) in every billing authority in England, plus the local authority name and code.
Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0.
Attribution: Contains Valuation Office Agency data and Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.
Refresh cadence: Council tax charges are set annually for the billing year starting 1 April. We re-load the dataset each year once all billing authorities have published their bands.
Last imported: April 2026, covering the 2026/27 billing year.

2. What we do

For pricing we run a layered query. We first look up every Land Registry transaction that matches the property's exact postcode unit. From those rows we calculate four headline figures:

• The average sale price across all transactions ever recorded at that postcode.
• The average price by property type — Detached, Semi-detached, Terraced, Flat/Maisonette, Other — with the transaction count for each type.
• A year-by-year price trend grouping all sales by the year of transfer.
• The ten most recent sales at the postcode, including price, date, property type, and address components.

For property reports, when an address line was supplied at checkout, we also try to isolate that specific property's previous sales by matching the Land Registry PAON (Primary Addressable Object Name) against the address line. The matcher handles two distinct cases: numbered properties (where we additionally require a street match to avoid “3 High Street” being confused with “3 The Mews”) and named properties (e.g. Spinney Farmhouse, where the property name alone is unique enough within a single postcode and PAF rural addressing typically omits the street).

UK postcodes are sparse — roughly 63% of postcodes that have ever appeared in PPD have a single sale on record. When the exact postcode returns nothing, we fall back to the outcode (e.g. BA13) so users see meaningful area-level pricing instead of a misleading £0. The report indicates clearly which scope (postcode / outcode / none) the figures came from.

For council tax we resolve the property's local billing authority via its administrative district code, surface the Band D charge as the standard benchmark, and label the local authority by name. Band D is the industry convention for cross-area comparison; we use it to keep council tax figures comparable between properties.

3. What we do not do

Several things that buyers reasonably want from a property market section deliberately are not produced by Home-Checker. We are explicit about them so you know what to obtain elsewhere:

• We do not value the property. The averages we present are historical fact; they are not a current valuation, an asking-price recommendation, or an offer figure. They tell you what has been paid; they do not tell you what this property is worth today.
• We do not adjust for inflation, condition, or extension. A £180,000 sale in 2008 is reported as £180,000 — we do not RPI-adjust it. A 1990 sale of a since-extended four-bed is reported alongside a 2024 sale of its unextended neighbour without any normalisation.
• We do not include leasehold premium / ground rent / service charge. Land Registry records the price paid for the title transfer. Lease length, escalating ground rent, and service charges materially affect a flat's true cost-of-ownership and value, but they are not in the PPD dataset.
• We do not include the user's specific council tax band. We surface the Band D benchmark for the local authority. To find the band for a specific property, search the VOA's address-level look-up on gov.uk.
• We do not predict future prices. The year-by-year trend is a backward-looking series. Forecasting future house prices is a regulated activity and outside the scope of this report.
• We do not include rental data. Home-Checker reports cover ownership transactions; rental yields, market rents, and HMO licensing are out of scope for V1.

4. Known limitations

• Excluded transaction types. Land Registry's published PPD excludes sales below market value (transfers between connected parties), commercial transactions, and right-to-buy at discount. New-build off-plan sales register on completion, which can be 18–30 months after the price was agreed.
• Lag. A sale that completed today will not appear in PPD until HM Land Registry has registered the title — typically 4–12 weeks for standard transactions, longer for new-builds. Our averages are always at least one month behind the live market.
• Tiny samples. A postcode with two sales in 30 years can produce a wildly skewed “average”. We report the transaction count alongside every average so you can judge the weight to give it.
• Outcode fallback dilutes specificity. When we fall back from postcode to outcode (e.g. BA13), the figure now covers a much wider area where housing stock and prices vary considerably. The report flags this scope change explicitly.
• Address matching is heuristic. The PAON / line-1 matcher we use for property reports is conservative — it favours under-matching (returning fewer sales than exist) over false positives. Properties with unusual or recently renumbered addresses may not match even when historical sales exist.
• Council tax bands can change. Bands are based on a 1991 valuation and are revised by the VOA only after material change (extension, conversion, sub-division). The Band D benchmark we show is the current charge for the billing year, but the property's specific band may be under appeal or pending review.

5. What this is not a substitute for

6. Disclaimer

The property market section is general information only, compiled from third-party public data under the licences listed above. Nothing in it constitutes financial advice, a valuation, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or let property. FloodWatch Ltd (trading as Home-Checker) is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and does not provide regulated financial advice. For the full liability framework that governs every Home-Checker report, please read the Report Disclaimer. For attribution and licensing of every dataset we use, see Data sources & attribution.

Other module methodology pages: methodology index.