Sunday, October 15, 2006

NetHousePrices

I thought people might like to take a look at the web-site nethouseprices.com. For those unfamiliar with it, it lists the price of every home sold in England and Wales from April 2000, and for Scotland from May 2000, onwards.

By law, all home purchases have to be registered with the Land Registry, including the price, and from 2005, under the Freedom of Information Act, the price (but not the name of the owner) is available to the public, and NetHousePrices buys the info and then put it on their web-site.

The web-site is free and all you have to do is type in the post-code (or the street name and city), and hey presto, the street name will appear as a clickable link, showing the average price in the road. Click this link, and you get a detailed breakdown, with the actual address, eg no 22 XYZ Street, the date the sale was completed, the price and the type of home (eg, flat, semi etc).

As you can see, it offers endless possibilities for snooping - checking out what your neighbours paid for theirs, your bosses home, etc. If you are looking to buy, you can check what the vendor originally paid, and check out the value of the street (which means you arn't dependant on the estate agent's patter for info). And if you know your MP's home address, you can look up that too...

4 comments:

dizzy said...

I think the name of the person who took the mortgage is shown on the Land Registry for a £3 per hit charge. It always was anyway as when I moved last my lawyers were rubbish and I had to keep checking the registry to see that it was done.

Anonymous said...

Yup, it (and others like it) is a cracking website and will be very helpful in establishing market values when Land Value Tax is introduced after the next property crash.

What doesn't go up can't come down.

snowflake5 said...

mark - I see you are still promoting this "property crash" followed by "Land Value Tax" rubbish. Not going to happen!

Anonymous said...

How do you mean "still"? I've only just started!

Why is it "rubbish"?

Why is it not going to happen? Actually, I know the answer to this - it's because it is "simple, fair and economically efficient" so Brown is going to hate it.