The property market is changing every day, and now more than ever you need to be able to constantly adapt to changing market conditions.

When sourcing property, or re-evaluating an existing portfolio, a huge part of the process should be looking at data to back up your decision making. But what data should you be looking at? And how do you find it?

Evaluating an area

It is important to consider objective facts when evaluating an area of interest. Some key statistics that should be considered include:

  • Average and/or median sold prices
  • Average asking prices, especially important when the market is hot where it can be a good indicator of the direction of property prices
  • % of sold properties that achieved their original asking price or more, again a good indicator showing how “hot” the market is in the area
  • Turnover of an estate agent’s stock, usually a good indicator of the demand in the area
  • Average rental prices for let agreed properties
  • Time to let for properties on the rental market

Other non-market related data should be considered as well, like the demographics of the population and nearby planning activity.

How do you find this data

In the UK, a lot of this data is available on the internet if you know where to look. Unfortunately, a lot of work typically needs to be done to arrive at these useful statistics. There are several property portals available to find property listings on, and cross referencing the listings on those portals with data from other sources can be a very time consuming task.

Fortunately there are tools available to property investors to access this data immediately without having to manually compile your own spreadsheets.

Simple, online tools

An example of this is PropertyEngine, which is an online tool which allows you to search in any area in England and Wales to immediately see statistics like those mentioned above, plus many more, so you can make smarter investment decisions. Not only can you look at data in particular areas, but you can also search across properties that are live on-market listings, and off-market properties, and get instant statistics and comparables in the local area. Gone are the days of having hundreds of tabs open when looking at properties, as you can now source properties and analyse the area and ROI using one simple tool.

PropertyEngine is offering a discount to readers of the Property Pulse blog, if you click here and use code PROPERTYPULSE22 you can try PropertyEngine for free and get over 35% off.

Jamie Greeff Property Engine