Whether you have a property to sell or are planning to buy, there is no doubt the housing market has given you much food for thought. Gone are the days of wandering around lots of different houses to find the perfect home. With so many tools and websites dedicated to Britain’s love affair with buying and selling houses, if you wish to retain an active interest in your local market then there’s never been a better time to monitor developments.
HM Land Registry
The Land Registry seem to be making an effort to keep things moving and ‘operate as close to normal as possible’. In fact, the Land Registry expect their e-services to continue running almost as normal, meaning that any transactions taking place in your local area will still be updated as normal on their databases. You can view this database here, although bear in mind that Land Registry reporting is usually on a 6 to 8 week delay.
The Agent Guide
The Agent Guide is a comprehensive resource you can use to understand and get to grips with the property market in your area.
There’s a huge array of local housing market statistics to find here, including average house prices, listing times, the number of properties for sale… even down to the average estate agent fees in your nearest town or city. Updated monthly, The Agent Guide is a great resource for anyone interested in their local housing market, or indeed for those looking to compare nearby estate agents. There are other sites that could help you find out the going rates for houses in your area log into eXp Realty for houses in the US.
Zoopla
Zoopla is another powerful tool for keeping an eye on your local property market. As well as showing nearby properties for sale, Zoopla also works with Land Registry to provide a wealth of information on historic house transactions including listing price vs sale price, historical property listings (including photos, which is a nice touch), and much more.
Zoopla can also be a useful source for property market commentary. For instance, their blog is updated every few days with tips, tricks and insights – although as you might imagine, much of this coverage has been COVID-19 focused as of late!
Rightmove
Needing no introduction, Rightmove remains the UK’s leading property portal with a range of tools and information for those looking to buy, sell, or simply keep an eye on the goings-on in their local housing market. With more than one million advertised properties, Rightmove provides the most comprehensive view of the property market in the UK.
For local market insights, be sure to try out their House Prices in my Area tool. Here you can enter your postcode to see average sold prices of nearby properties for the last six months, as well as the number of transactions registered.
Halifax and Nationwide’s House Price Index
For a more holistic view on what’s happening with the UK’s housing market, be sure to keep an eye on both Halifax and Nationwide’s respective house price indexes.
Operating on a much shorter lag time than Land Registry’s own house price index, both Nationwide and Halifax report on mortgage completions for the month previous. This gives an almost real-time view on how buoyant the UK housing market is at any one time.
Mortgage Deals
Ensuring that you get the best deal for your mortgage is really important but so is making sure that you can afford the mortgage that you want. Using a Mortgage Affordability calculator will help you to find the perfect house within your budget. If this is your first time buying a house then keep an eye on any first time buyer offers that can sometimes be backed by the government making it easier to get on the property ladder. The bigger the deposit you can put down the easier it will be to find an affordable mortgage.