Sellers flock to research nearby property prices

If you’ve been wondering how much the property down the road sold for, you’re not alone.

Savvy home-hunters and owners around the UK have been dialling up their property research in recent weeks, suggesting that many are getting ready to put their property on the market once lockdown has been eased.

In fact, our recent ‘Is the property market in lockdown?’ webinar’s audience poll confirmed that lockdown has done little to change the plans of those looking to move, other than to result in a revised timeframe, with 94% saying that they were planning to go ahead with their move as planned now or after lockdown.

If you’ve not used our sold prices search before, here’s everything you need to know to help you get your research off to a flying start.

What are sold prices and why are they useful?

Sold prices are the amount a property finally sold for, at the point of completion, and come from the Land Registry and the Registers of Scotland.

They will factor in any price reductions or negotiations that were made between a buyer and seller and serve as an incredibly useful gauge of how your local market is performing and how much similar properties to your own have been selling for.

How should I use sold prices?

Sold price search is available on the Rightmove website and it’s a great place to start your property research.

Depending on where you live, what you’re looking for and how specific you want your search to be, there are a couple of different ways you can search:

By town, city or station

This is useful if you want to get a general feel for property prices in your area, as this will give you an overview of everything that’s been selling.

This can be a useful search if you live in an area where properties rarely come onto the market or there aren’t many similar properties to yours in your immediate area.

Postcode

A great way to check properties that have recently sold in your street and immediate area. You can either search only in the area that your postcode covers or broaden it out slightly with incremental radius filters.

Once you have decided which route you are most interested in, we’ll show you all the information we hold on the location, including the average property price for the area and how prices have changed in the past year.

At this point, you have the option to refine your search further should you wish to via the filters provided:

• This area only – if you select this option you can extend the radius of properties that are included in your search
• All years – here you can select how far back you’d like us to search in years
• All property types – refine to a specific property type that you’re interested in
• All tenures – useful if you’re specifically interested in either freehold or leasehold properties

You can search for any property on our sold prices search, as long as it sold on or after May 2000 and the data is refreshed each month, via official feeds from the Land Registry and the Registers of Scotland databases.