For first time buyers
Built by a first time buyer, for first time buyers.
I recently joined the ever-growing club of first time buyers. Membership is free. House is not.
And like most people going through it for the first time, I found it, well, terrifying. Just your standard mix of market movements, aggressive enthusiastic estate agents, mortgage rates that seem to change weekly, and the sudden realisation that a bathroom renovation costs how much now?
At some point, every property starts looking either like a bargain or a trap. And you have absolutely no idea which.
"4 in 10 recent homeowners said buying a home was one of the most stressful life events they'd experienced."
(The other 6 in 10 are cool, calm and collected. We don't talk about them.)
Early on I started doing the same thing for every property I viewed, opening far too many tabs, digging through Land Registry data, comparing nearby sales, trying to work out if the asking price was fair or just a bit cheeky. All while trying not to look like an absolute mug when it came to making an offer.
After a while I thought: surely there's a better way to do this than drowning in bookmarks and tabs for every listing.
So I built one.
The tool combines two official government datasets, both available in linked data format from HM Land Registry: Price Paid Data and the UK House Price Index.
Here is what happens when you check a property.
First, the tool looks up the full sale history for that specific address, every recorded sale with its date and price paid.
Second, it pulls comparable sales from the same street over the last three years, filtered by property type, so you can see what the surrounding market actually looks like.
Third, it uses the UK House Price Index to measure how much prices in that region have grown since the last sale. It applies that growth to the last sold price to estimate what the property should be worth today, then compares that figure to the asking price to produce the verdict.
This goes without saying, but I have to say it anyway: disclaimer, duh. Is It Cheeky? won't replace a surveyor or a mortgage advisor. But it will give you a quick, data-backed sense check on whether the asking price looks fair before you make an offer.
Check whether a property's asking price is fair, using real Land Registry sold data.