How the figures on RealScout are computed. Every threshold here is read from the dataset itself, so it describes the code that produced the numbers.

Where the data comes from

RealScout is built on HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, which records every property sale registered in England and Wales. Because sold prices alone do not tell you how big a property is, we combine each sale with the floor area recorded in the property’s Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) from the Energy Performance of Buildings Register.

How we compute price per square metre

For each matched sale we divide the sold price by the EPC floor area to get a price per square metre. We then aggregate those figures by area and publish the median — half of matched sales sit above it, half below — alongside the underlying transactions, so you can judge the evidence behind each number yourself. Square-foot figures are converted from the same underlying data (1 square metre = 10.7639 square feet). Every transaction we use is also downloadable as a free CSV from each area page — up to 60 months of sales per district. The dataset page explains what the export contains, how to cite it and what the Open Government Licence asks of you in return.

Coverage

Countries: England and Wales.
Not covered: Scotland and Northern Ireland (no HM Land Registry Price Paid Data / EPC register coverage).
History: Every area page carries quarterly and yearly figures from 1995 — the first year of Price Paid Data — to the latest release.

Which sales count

Full-market sales only: Standard full-market-value sales only; repossessions, buy-to-lets sold at non-market value, portfolio and power-of-sale transfers (category B) and deleted/amended records are out. In the pipeline that is ppdcat = 'A' AND recordstatus = 'A'.
Property types: Detached, semi-detached, terraced and flat or maisonette. Other registered categories — commercial and “other” records — are excluded.
Price range: Sales below £10,000 or above £20,000,000 are dropped as data errors or non-market transfers.
Floor-area range: EPC floor areas below 10 m² or above 2,000 m² are dropped.
Matching a sale to a floor area: Floor area comes from EPC register TOTAL_FLOOR_AREA. A sale is only matched to an EPC when the address-similarity score is at least 0.92 (exact normalised-address hit scores 2.0, otherwise Jaro-Winkler within the postcode).

How wide a window each figure covers

Widen to the first window with at least `target_priced` EPC-matched sales; fall back to the widest window otherwise.

Districts: 12, 24, 36 then 60 months, stopping at the first window with at least 30 matched sales.
Sectors: 24, 36 then 60 months, stopping at the first window with at least 10 matched sales.
Areas with no matched floor areas: Without EPC data the ladder counts all transactions instead of matched ones.

The window in force is stated next to every figure, so a count is never shown without the period it covers.

Confidence

Each area carries a confidence level rather than an implied precision it does not have. The score combines three things: number of matched sales (50%), floor-area match rate (25%) and how recent those sales are (25%).

Formula: 0.5 × min(1, priced / target) + 0.25 × match_rate + 0.25 × recency Without EPC-matched sales the match-rate term drops out: 0.5 × min(1, transactions / target) + 0.25 × recency (match_rate 0).
Volume target: district 100 matched sales and sector 30 matched sales. An area at or above its target scores full marks on volume.
Recency: Share of matched sales falling in the latest half of the window.
Levels: High ≥ 0.75, Medium ≥ 0.5 and Low < 0.5.
Caps: However the score lands, areas with no EPC-matched floor areas are capped at Medium and areas whose floor areas are estimated are capped at Low.

Outliers

Sanity band: Any sale implying under £200 or over £50,000 per m² is dropped. This applies across the full 1995+ history, trend series included.
Statistical fence: Log-scale (multiplicative) IQR on ln(£/m²), computed per district over the trailing 60 months: keep exp(q1 - 1.5 × iqr) .. exp(q3 + 1.5 × iqr). The multiplier is 1.5 times the interquartile range (the gap between the 25th and 75th percentiles), the standard convention.
Per-sector floor: The per-row bounds widen to the row's own sector [q1, q3] of ln(£/m²), so no sector can lose its middle 50% to a district-wide fence.
Older history: Outside the 60-month window only the £/m² value is nulled — price and volume series keep every sale.
What we tell you: The number of excluded sales is published for every area, under its transactions table.

The history charts

Grain: quarterly and yearly series, from 1995 onwards.
Thin quarters are withheld: A period's median £/m² is withheld below 8 matched resale sales — that count is the median's own denominator and is published as priced_count.
Resale only: The price-per-m² lines use resale sales only, so a burst of new-build completions cannot masquerade as a market move. transaction_count and avg_price stay all-sales (volume is volume); only the £/m² medians are resale-only.
The most recent quarter: The quarter containing data_anchor is incomplete (Land Registry registration lag) and carries partial: true. It is drawn dashed and hatched, and left out of every growth figure.

Adjusting for the mix of homes sold

The raw median also moves when the mix of homes sold changes — a quarter heavy in flats reads as a fall. Holding the mix constant leaves movement that is much closer to price change.

Method: Fixed-weight (Laspeyres-style) property-type index: per period take the median £/m² of resale sales of each type, then combine them using the area's long-run type mix.
Weights: Each area's share of matched resale sales by type (D/S/T/F) over the trailing 60 months, held constant across every period and published as mix_weights.
Thresholds: at least 8 matched sales of a type within the period, at least 2 types clearing that bar and those types covering at least 60% of the area's long-run mix. Weights are renormalised over the types that clear the threshold.
Areas with no mix-adjusted line: Where one type is ~85%+ of an area's sales (city-centre flat districts, single-type terraced valleys) a second type never clears the threshold, so no mix index is published — correctly, because the raw median already is that type's median and there is no mix to hold constant.
What we do not do: No full hedonic regression — the available attributes (type, floor area, tenure, new-build) do not support one honestly.

Inflation adjustment

The History tab’s money basis switches between cash terms — the prices actually paid at the time — and today’s money, where every past figure is restated in current money so a 1995 figure and a 2026 one buy the same amount.

Index used: CPIH (all items, 2015=100) (series L522), monthly from 1988-01.
Method: Nominal × (CPI_latest / CPI_period), i.e. restated in the money of the reference month in cpi_base. A period's index value is the mean monthly index over the calendar months the period covers.
Reference month: Real-terms figures are expressed in 2026-06 money — that month is the 100 base of the adjustment.
Source: Office for National Statistics, released 2026-07-21, Open Government Licence v3.0 — view the series.

New-build sales

Excluded from the headline: New-build sales are excluded from the headline median price per m², because their premium would otherwise inflate development-heavy areas. They are identified by Land Registry oldnew = 'Y'.
Reported separately: The new-build premium is published as its own figure: new_build.premium_pct = new-build median £/m² against the resale headline median, in per cent. It is only shown where an area has at least 10 matched new-build sales in the window.

Breakdown by property type

Each area page splits the median price per m² by property type (detached, semi-detached, terraced and flat or maisonette), publishing a type only where it has at least 10 matched sales in the window. Types below that bar are left out rather than shown from a handful of sales.

Two counts on one card

Sale-price statistics: Every category-A sale in the window (transaction_count).
Price-per-m² statistics: Only the EPC-matched subset (priced_count).

One card can carry two populations. Both counts are always published; £ statistics are deliberately NOT restricted to the matched set, because the all-sales median price is the more robust number and the honest label is cheaper than the re-computation.

Postcode-level figures

Minimum sales: A full postcode needs at least 3 matched sales before any price per m² is shown, and the figures are client-side from the district transaction list.
Ranges: The middle 60% of sales (p20–p80) is withheld below 10 sales.
How it is labelled: 3-9 sales must render an explicit 'indicative' badge pointing at the sector for reliable statistics; below 10 sales no p20-p80 range is shown and no confidence level is implied.

Areas where we publish no price per m²

Districts with fewer than 30 matched sales over 60 months publish NULL £/m² (price statistics intact) and are capped at Low confidence; the legacy 2024 BigQuery £/m² seed is retired as a published source. Those areas are marked in the dataset as ppsqm_source = 'estimate'. Sale prices, counts and the individual transactions are still published — we would rather show fewer statistics than doubtful ones.

How often the data is updated

We refresh our dataset periodically from the official releases. Land Registry publishes new and corrected transactions on a rolling basis, and there can be a lag of weeks or months between a sale completing and it appearing in the data.

Affordability assumptions

The affordability figures on each area page are illustrations, not offers. They rest on a small set of published assumptions, all held in one place in the code so they can be reviewed together:

Borrowing is capped at 4.5× gross household income — a typical mainstream lender cap, not a guarantee.
Monthly payments assume a repayment mortgage over 25 years at 4%, 4.5%, 5.5%. These illustrative rates are as of July 2026, based on Bank of England average quoted mortgage rates. Your actual rate will differ.
Loan-to-value scenarios are 90%, 75%, 60%; deposit scenarios are 5%, 10%, 25% of the price.
Years to save a deposit assumes 10% of gross income is saved each year, with no investment return and no house-price growth.
Earnings used in the price-to-earnings ratio are approximate median full-time gross annual earnings by region from ONS ASHE, shown with their vintage on the page itself.

Stamp duty is computed at the Stamp Duty Land Tax rates for England and Northern Ireland effective from April 2025: standard rates of 0% to £250,000, 5% to £925,000, 10% to £1.5m and 12% above, and first-time buyer relief of 0% to £300,000 then 5% to £500,000, with relief withdrawn entirely above £500,000. Wales charges Land Transaction Tax and Scotland charges Land and Buildings Transaction Tax; neither is modelled, so figures for Welsh areas are shown as the England and Northern Ireland equivalent and labelled as such. Surcharges for additional properties and non-resident buyers are not included.

How growth figures are computed

Change over a range and annual growth (the compound annual growth rate, or CAGR) are computed from the quarterly series, averaging up to the first three and last three quarters that have data rather than reading single endpoints. One unusual quarter at either end would otherwise rewrite the headline. The most recent quarter is normally incomplete — Land Registry registrations lag completed sales by roughly two to eight weeks — so it is marked on the charts and excluded from the growth arithmetic.

The headline growth figure: Each area page also carries a precomputed 10-year figure, in cash terms and after inflation, with the period it covers stated beside it.
Endpoints: Mean of the first and last 3 non-partial quarterly points of the window.
Series used: The mix-adjusted series where both endpoints exist, otherwise the raw median (reported as growth.basis).

Frequently asked questions

Where does the data come from?

From official open data: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data for sold prices, the Energy Performance of Buildings Register for floor areas, and the ONS CPIH index for the inflation adjustment. All are published by UK government bodies and updated regularly.

Why £ per square metre?

Headline sold prices mix up the value of an area with the size of the properties that happen to sell there. Dividing by floor area gives a like-for-like measure, so you can compare a street of small flats with a street of large houses on equal terms — the same way most of Europe already compares property.

How accurate is it?

The figures are computed from real registered sales, not asking prices. That said, they describe areas, not properties: any individual home can sell well above or below its local median depending on condition, exact location and timing. Floor areas come from EPC assessments, which occasionally contain errors. Treat the figures as a well-founded reference point for an area, not a statement about one address.

Why is my postcode missing?

Smaller areas can have too few matched sales to produce a reliable figure — we would rather show nothing than a misleading number from a handful of transactions. Areas in Scotland and Northern Ireland are outside the dataset entirely, and very recent sales may not yet have reached the official releases.

Attribution

Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Floor areas derived from the Energy Performance of Buildings Register (address data © Royal Mail). Contains ONS and OS data © Crown copyright and database right, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, including the Office for National Statistics CPIH inflation series. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO.

Methodology