Methodology

Why trust this?

Every figure on this site traces back to a named official source — never a guess, never a proprietary model dressed up as fact, never something scraped from a listings site without a licence to use it. Here's exactly how that works, and just as importantly, what we deliberately don't show and why.

How each check works

Almost everything in a report is queried live, at the moment you search, directly against the government or public body that actually holds the data — not a cache of scraped listings, not a third-party aggregator's re-packaging of someone else's numbers. A handful of checks (school Ofsted ratings, census demographics, air quality) come from periodic bulk files the relevant body publishes, imported on our own schedule rather than live, since that's genuinely how those particular datasets are distributed — every such case is labelled as such inline, in that card's own detail view.

What we deliberately don't show

The property-data market has real gaps that no free source fills. Rather than paper over them with an estimate, a model, or someone else's licensed data, we say so plainly. If it isn't listed below, it's because we found a genuine free source for it.

Council Tax band Not published as free open data anywhere — the VOA's banding list is a paid product.
Live "for sale" listings Rightmove/Zoopla listings are licensed data. We show sold-price history from HM Land Registry instead — the free, official equivalent.
School catchment areas (most of the UK) Most English school admissions don't have a fixed catchment at all — distance is only a tie-breaker, and it shifts yearly. We show real published boundaries where a council actually publishes them, and say "not covered" everywhere else, rather than modelling an estimate like paid competitors do.
Service charge / ground rent amounts Private lease information, only disclosed to a solicitor during an actual purchase. We do show Freehold/Leasehold status from Land Registry, which is free.
Brownfield land status Self-published per-council in ~300 different registers with no single live national feed.
Full planning application history No unified national API across England's local planning authorities.
Actual sunlight hours / overshadowing Needs LIDAR-based shadow modelling, not a live lookup. We show garden/frontage compass orientation instead, as an honest proxy.
Corporate/overseas property ownership Land Registry's CCOD/OCOD dataset sits behind a licence click-through, not a straightforward open download.

Every source we query