House prices
October 2, 2011
I don’t quite understand why the price that property sold for isn’t easily publicly available. The current system on Registers of Scotland allows you to search a 6 month period but you need the first 4 characters of the post code and you also need to use IE or Firefox for it to work. It is apparently being upgraded. I also hope that access to the Sasine register ( pre 2003 sales records ) will become available online ( even if it costs ) , as the current 7 working days ( 10 actual days ) turnaround is archaic
If you happen to be interested in a property that is being sold under the wrong post code and also not the name the property was originally registered under ( which isn’t uncommon with Gaelic and English versions ) , good luck trying to find any prices.
A really useful tool in the process of finding the official address of a property or which properties a postcode covers is the One Scotland Gazeteer, which allows one search at a time and shows the results on an Ordnance Survey map, giving you the UPRN ( unique property reference number ) the council use in their gazetteer and planning process.
I think making the prices clearly publicly available would clear matters up and not let home sellers go on the hearsay of what they thought their neighbours got.
Also a service that would show what the relationship between asking prices and selling prices, because some home sellers get a valuation report they think their property will sell for at least that price, well depending on location it could but if you are in a more rural setting the likelihood is you will be offered less especially with the current economic situation. If home sellers could see that properties in their village frequently go for under asking then they might not spend 2 year sitting on for sale.
The other problem with not easily accessible sales data is people think the market is stagnant which it currently is to a degree but not as much as people think. This is exacerbated by estate agents very soon after a property sells from their site, or in some cases just removing the listing and not indicating it sold, I would have thought sales were something to publicise to give potenial sellers confidence that you actually shift property. I was faced by a seller saying nothing is shifting where at least 1 property a month is shifting in just her village, but their is no easy way for her to come by that information.
The only way I know how much is shifting is by having daily web scrapers on the agent websites plus manual scraping and parsing of the ROS site, which is beyond the average person abilities.
I wonder if there is any licensing cost associated with this data?
