Valuations and insights

Five analyses, each answering a different question. Every one of them is an estimate produced by a model, and the useful part of this page is what each one is reading, because that is what decides how much weight it carries.

None of them is advice. A valuation you are going to act on comes from a surveyor.

Price estimate

What it answers: is this priced sensibly?

It takes the property, finds up to ten others of the same type in the same city, and compares. You get a figure, a confidence of high, medium or low, and a couple of sentences saying how it got there.

Read the confidence and the comparable count before the figure. Ten close comparables in a liquid market is a real answer. Two, in a city where nothing similar has been listed, is arithmetic dressed up.

The comparison is by city and property type, not by district or street. In a city where the district is most of the price, treat the estimate as a range rather than a number.

Neighbourhood report

What it answers: what is it like to live there?

A summary, three to five things worth knowing, and three scores out of ten: transport, safety and amenities.

This one reads nothing from the catalogue. It is what the model knows about that district, which makes it good on the things that are stable and public, and unreliable on anything that has changed recently or is too small to be well documented. It is a briefing on an area you do not know, not a source on one you do.

Reports are held for a day, so asking twice about the same district costs once.

Commute

What it answers: how far is it, really?

An estimate between the property and somewhere you name.

It is an estimate rather than a routing query, so use it to compare candidates rather than to plan a morning. The difference between twenty and fifty minutes is real and it will tell you; the difference between twenty and twenty-five is not.

Investment analysis

What it answers: what would this return?

Estimated monthly rent, gross yield, net yield, and a five-year projection, with the reasoning.

It reads the price, the size, the age, the condition, the energy label, the service charges and the monthly fees, which is genuinely most of what determines a yield. What it does not read is the local rental market: the rent is estimated from the property rather than from what comparable flats nearby actually let for.

So the ratios are worth more than the absolute figures. If the rent estimate looks wrong to you, it probably is, and everything downstream of it moves with it.

Floor plan analysis

What it answers: what am I looking at?

Give it a floor plan image and it returns the total area, the number of rooms, a description of the layout, and a note on flow, light and how efficiently the space is used.

It is at its best on the thing floor plans are worst at communicating, which is whether the space works: a corridor eating six square metres, a bedroom you reach through another bedroom, a kitchen with no wall for appliances.

Treat the area figure as approximate. It is read off a drawing, and drawings are not always to scale.

What each costs

The prices track what each one costs us to run rather than what it is worth to you, which is why a commute is the cheapest and an investment analysis is the dearest. See credits.

Using them together

For a property you are seriously considering, the order that wastes the least is the neighbourhood report first, because it is the one most likely to rule the area out; then the price estimate, because it decides whether the rest of the conversation is about this property at all; then the investment analysis if you are letting it.

Running all five on everything you open is an expensive way to browse.