How To Research Property Prices In An Area
It has never been easier to research property prices in an area, and now you can do it from the comfort of your own home.
There are many websites out there that have bought the land registry data that reveals sale prices for properties all over the country. The best news of all is that many of them make this information available to you, completely free of charge, making it an excellent and readily available online resource for you to use.
As searching on the internet for 'find property prices' on google will tell you, there are lots of sites making this information available for free, sometimes requiring registration to access, sometimes not.
Firstly, you can search on the land registry website itself (the government site) at the following location:
http://houseprices.landregistry.gov.uk/sold-prices/
Simply enter the postcode, street or address to find out sale information. You will then see a list of property sales and can click through for further details (note it is not always the case that all sales are listed on the register, so there could have been sales not showing on the register for a variety of different reasons).
The land registry site for a charge will usually link through to the title plan and title register, and possibly a flood report for the property, available to be purchased online, so again if you are seriously interested in a property then you may decide you wish to purchase these.
You can also find this information on a range of other sites, including the large property search sites like rightmove and zoopla. These sites may actually list images inside the house, if it has sold on that site before, and possibly even provide an estimate of the current valuation and more besides (map of the area) and so forth. So even though various sites have access to house price data, it is worth looking a property up on several different sites, as usually there are some snippets of information available on some sites that are different to others, so you learn more in being able to build up an aggregate picture by looking at several sources.
Finally, as well as looking at the specifics of an individual property, it is worth looking at the market trends both generally for the market and in a particular area too, as there are hotspots and lowspots that change a lot more than the market, for instance if a new and exciting development of a town centre is being undertaken, this can inflate prices in an area, so it is worth looking at the market trends sections of the major sites to find out more.
More first-time house buying articles:
- Questions to Ask at a Property Viewing
- What is a Mortgage?
- What is Building & Contents Insurance?
- How to Get on the Housing Register
- How To Get a Landlord to Deal with Problems