There are a number of regular monthly reports focusing on the UK property market and, as a house-hunter, you need to know which survey is best.
At Rightmove, we are proud to be the UK's leading property website. Our property search
displays a stock of more than one million properties at any one time - which are collectively worth approximately £270 billion -
and the Rightmove website regularly receives 30 million visits a month.
In addition to this, since the sample we use to compile the Rightmove House Price Index takes into account all new properties added to our website
(representing around 90% of all available residential properties(, we are in a unique position to comment on changes in asking prices.
Two other prominent house prices indices are compiled by the country's most prolific mortgage lenders - Nationwide and Halifax. These indices are
based on each lender's approved mortgages that month - which naturally leads to a much smaller sample size than that of Rightmove.
One other thing to note is that, the prices recorded are those agreed at the point when the mortgage is granted, not when the property first hits the market or at the point of sale.
Another monthly survey is compiled by the Land Registry, using data collected from all sales of residential houses in England and Wales, whether
through cash transactions or mortgage lending. This is one advantage the Land Registry Index has over the Nationwide and Halifax surveys,
since they only take in to account property sales financed by mortgages. However, the land registry methodology means that there is a three month time delay
in the availability of data.
While some property market reports are based, to a certain extent, on the opinions of real estate professionals, the Rightmove
House Price Index is produced entirely from
factual information about actual prices of residential properties currently on the market.
10,000 estate agency branches list their properties on the Rightmove website and, because we have access to this amount of data,
we are able to use a sample of up to 200,000 houses each month to produce our survey. This represents the largest, most up-to-date monthly sample
of any house price report publisher in the United Kingdom.
Boasting such a wide-ranging sample size and offering highly accurate, up-to-the-minute information from the very beginning of
the home buying and selling process, Rightmove has earned a reputation as an extremely reliable indicator of house prices trends in the UK market.