Frequently asked questions
Plain answers about the figures RealScout publishes. The methodology page carries the full rules; the glossary defines every term.
The measure
What is price per square metre?
The price a home sold for, divided by its internal floor area in square metres. A £450,000 sale of a 90 m² house is £5,000 per square metre. Because it corrects for size, it lets a flat be compared with a house, and one area with another, in a way a raw sale price cannot.
What is a good price per square metre in the UK?
There is no single good number: the same pound buys ten times more space in some districts than in others, around a median of £3,380 per square metre across England & Wales. What matters is the comparison: how a price per square metre sits against the median and the p20–p80 range of its own district, which is exactly what each RealScout area page shows.
Why does RealScout publish medians rather than averages?
A median is the middle sale: half of matched sales came in above it, half below. A mean can be dragged a long way by one £20 million sale in a small sample, and postcode districts are small samples. RealScout publishes the mean alongside the median where both are robust, but the median is the headline because it resists outliers.
What does the p20–p80 range mean?
The range holding the middle 60% of matched sales: 20% of sales were cheaper than the low end and 20% dearer than the high end. It shows the spread of a market rather than a single point, and it is deliberately not the full min-to-max range, whose ends are dominated by unusual sales.
Does RealScout show price per square foot?
Yes. Every figure can be switched between £ per square metre and £ per square foot on the page; one square metre is 10.7639 square feet. The underlying data is metric because EPC floor areas are recorded in square metres.
The data
Where does the data come from?
Two public sources, both open data: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, which records every registered sale in England & Wales since 1995 with its price, date and address; and the Energy Performance of Buildings Register, which records each certified home’s internal floor area. RealScout matches the two on address and publishes the result under the same Open Government Licence v3.0.
How accurate are EPC floor areas?
Imperfect, and RealScout says so wherever it matters. An EPC records the total internal floor area to the whole square metre, excluding garages, unheated porches and low-ceiling spaces, and assessors do make mistakes: the Office for National Statistics found only a minority of EPC floor areas agree with survey measurements to within a few per cent. Across hundreds of sales in a district these errors largely wash out of a median; for any single home the EPC figure should be treated as approximate.
What is a "matched sale"?
A sale whose address could be matched to an Energy Performance Certificate, giving it a floor area, which is what makes a price per square metre computable. Sales without a match are still counted and listed; they are excluded only from the per-square-metre figures. The matched count is printed beside every £/m² median because it is that median’s own denominator.
Why does my area show no figure, or a caveat?
Thin samples are suppressed rather than published. A district median needs at least 30 matched sales in its window; ranges need 50; smaller areas fall back to a longer window or to their parent area, and the page says so when that happens. A number computed from six sales would be noise wearing the costume of a statistic.
Can RealScout value my house?
No. RealScout publishes statistics about past sold prices; it does not value property, and no figure on the site is an estimate of what any particular home is worth. What it can tell you is what nearby homes actually sold for, per square metre, so an asking price can be judged against the local market’s own record.
Coverage and freshness
Does RealScout cover Scotland or Northern Ireland?
No: England & Wales only, because HM Land Registry Price Paid Data does not include Scotland or Northern Ireland. Scottish sales are registered with Registers of Scotland and Northern Irish sales with Land & Property Services; RealScout says "not covered" rather than guessing.
How up to date are the figures?
The whole dataset is rebuilt monthly from the current HM Land Registry release; the current build covers sales to June 2026. Two lags are inherent to the source and stated on the pages: registrations lag sales by 2–8 weeks, so the newest sales appear a month or two after completion, and recent quarters are shown as partial until the register catches up.
Are new-build sales included?
They are counted and listed, but the headline £/m² figures exclude them. New-builds sell at a premium that fades once they resell, so mixing them in would overstate what an existing home is worth. Where a district has enough new-build sales, its premium is published as its own figure.
Using the data
Can I download or reuse the data?
Yes, free, including commercially. Every area page exports its sales as CSV, the dataset page carries a one-row-per-district summary CSV and JSON endpoints, and everything is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The one condition is attribution: reproduce the Crown copyright line shown on the dataset page.
How should I cite RealScout?
Cite the page you took the figure from, with its dataset month, and include the licence line: "Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0." The dataset page has a ready-made citation with a copy button.
Who runs RealScout?
Olivier Bildstein, its founder. RealScout is part of Matera Capital Limited, a company registered in England (Companies House no. 17008036). The about page describes the editorial rules the site holds itself to, and corrections are read at contact@materacapital.com.
Look up an area
Median price per square metre, sold prices and price history for any postcode district in England & Wales.