After a bleak start where the demand crashed the servers, the police crime maps are now accessible.
I think these will really change the way smart people look for a house. Whilst before you could tour an area at weekends at night to see how much activity there was, you now get an idea of how much actual anti-social behaviour there is now.
It does only show reported crime though and there is some worry that people will stop reporting crime in order to make their area look better. However I think this is self-defeating. If you have a problem with anti-social behaviour it’s often evident. From groups of youths hanging about, graffiti, to litter and broken glass. A wise house buyer will already have been pricing up car and home insurance before moving too – that way you get no surprises at all.
I think it’s a positive thing as it really shows the detail you need to allow you to be prepared for any problems. If you see one street has a high anti-social problem then when you drive down it you might realise it’s got a corner shop where kids hang out on. This might be a problem if you live near the shop but streets a bit further away will probably be fine!
I hope these maps will actually encourage people to report crime and get villains locked up. Often it’s just one person who can cause lots of problems and once they’re dealt with you get peace and quiet and a lot less crime.
When you’re buying a hosue though it will allow you to see a snap shot of crime only – but if you print out (or screen grab and save the images) on a regular basis you’ll build up a more complete picture of what crime is in an area. One bad month doesn’t mean it’s a bad area, it might have just been a one off incident causing the issues.
As with all major purchases buying a house is a huge decision and not one to be rushed into lightly. If you’re buying a house or about to put an offer in, then look at the crime maps, and the cost of insurance there. Compare where you live now and see whether it’s more or less. Perhaps keep looking and don’t rush into buying that house now, but wait a month and look at the next month’s crime data too.
Some crimes happen because of people not taking proper precautions. A house with an alarm and locked up each time you go out is less likely to be broken into. A car left on the drive with the engine running is more likely to be stolen then if you sit in the car whilst waiting for the windows to demist.
Look for areas that are in home watch schemes too – or consider starting one. Sometimes something as simple as neighbours getting together can start to make a difference to an area.
Author: Diane
Sold prices of property
There are several sites that you can look up sold property prices on. The land registry doesn’t publish prices of properties that are “sold under market value” so excludes repos and auction properties. It can also exclude properties sold to companies.
I do feel this is slightly dishonest and that all house price data should be available freely. After all something sells for market value at the price it sells for. It is also artificially inflating property prices by excluding lower prices sold at.
My favourite site to view them on is HousePrices.co.uk – this site allows you to put in a general area, postcode, street name and town to find the house prices.
Of course if a property isn’t listed then it doesn’t mean it hasn’t sold. Some properties just don’t show up. You can view the sale price usually by paying £4 to the land registry to see the title information of the property – but if you want to know a lot of houses that aren’t listed then it could easily get expensive.
It allows you to view in 10, 25, 50 or 100 results at a time. You can follow a street or postcode by asking for an email each time results are updated. This happens at the start of every month usually.
It gives you the sale date, sale price, type (detached or semi or terraced) and whether it’s freehold or leasehold and whether it’s new build or not. It gives the full address of properties too so is useful for looking up postcodes of places too. You can also viuew the current value or the property and see property for sale nearby. These links take you to zoopla.
Official launch of Police Crime maps
Police crime maps have been officially launched today – 1st February. They have been up and running for a while but it’s official today! They’re really useful. So useful that you’ll wish you’d had access to the data years ago.
Type in the area you’re looking to buy in and you get a street by street breakdown of crime and types of crime. Fantastic for spotting rogue roads that might look all nice and quiet during the day – but will reveal the levels of crime including anti-social behaviour. It only shows the previous months though and we’re not sure they plan to archive data. You might want to learn to do screen grabs of the page or even print it out – especially if you’re trying to achieve a discount on the asking price of a property. Or you might even want to not buy a property when you discover what goes on around there!
It’s an amazing piece of data displaying that will show you the nice sides of towns and the dodgy sides. Someone on the BBC news was worried it might affect house prices! Too right it will! As well as lowering the prices in rough areas, it might however put prices up in quiet areas!
It’s well worth looking at the areas you’re interested in buying a house in! Fantastic stuff!
Peter Jones – Dragon – selling his house
Peter Jones from the BBC program Dragon’s Den is selling his home.
His house was built in 2002 and is a 6 bedroom detached place in Beaconsfield.
Peter Jones House link is perfectly decluttered so there’s no personal photos about. There’s a study though where you might conjure up some fantastic business ideas!
House near Dulverton
This amazing house near Dulverton is stunning! It’s actually got several appartments that make up the house, but you could use it all as one house, or have it partly let out as holiday lets!
Knapp house has a cinema room and a gym and lots of outdoor space.
The property is currently advertised as holiday lets on this site Knapp House which shows you a few more views.
If you look on google streetmap you’ll see the entrance way to the house with the name Knapp on the gateposts.
It’s a charming house and was built in about 1907. It was used in the past as a school. The grounds have an orchard, barbeque area and equestrian area with stables. It’s perfect for country living and is situated in a quiet part of Devon close to Exmoor.
This house is on my wish list!
Zoopla Property App on the iPad
The Zoopla app is free on the iPad.
It only works in portrait mode. It does ask to use your current location when you start it up but then doesn’t always seem to use it for anything.
It’s default is the map view but there’s other options including a hybrid and a list mode. Type in your search and it takes you to a map view. It also doesn’t seem to remember the names of places you’ve typed in which makes it frustrating to have to type in names again.
The hybrid view shows satelite image with roads overlaid on it. The map view is just a road map style. The list doesn’t show any map at all but listed the properties in price order.
The properties are shown as purple pins stuck in a map and you click on them to see the brief detail which includes number of bedrooms and property type and price. You then click on the arrow to see more details.
From the details page you get more info, and the agent’s phone number and you can request details by email.
You can also ‘star’ the property as a favourite. THere is an option for viewing favourites at the bottom of the main screen. There’s also options for showing rentals, values and sold prices which makes it a useful app for doing more detailed price research.
The price trends chart shows landscape and just to confuse you it turns if you rotate the pad. It’s got the sold prices for the different types of residential property in the area over the last few years. It is useful to compare to previous years and shows you the property peak prices in 08/09.
This is vaguely useful info but not as good as looking up previous sold prices for that particular property.
Property Bee
This tool is amazing. Property Bee is a fantastic add on for your browser that enables you to follow properties on rightmove and see when information has changed.
You need to use firefox browser for it and install it from Property bee’s website. I use this and it’s fantastic fun! If you’re at work you might have to ask permission from your boss.
You need to ensure you’re showing changes in the Styles drop down box and that you’re working in a bee on the options drop down box on the Property Bee Toolbar.
Once you’ve got it set up you can browse various property websites and see the data collected by other people and it’ll keep the changes you spot and add them to the history of the property.
It does have a few failings – when a property is taken off rightmove and put back on it doesn’t keep it’s history. This is a shame but if you store properties in your favourites on rightmove you can see the brief info about the property stored there.
If rightmove changes it’s site layout it ceases to work too until the inventor creates an update. This rarely takes long though. The tool is free to use but feel free to send the maker a donation!
So what do you see?
You’ll see new changes in yellow and the day after they change to blue. They get listed plain after that. This makes it easy to spot changes and see how long the property has been on the market.
It works on rightmove.co.uk, daft.ie, propertynews.com, espc.co.uk, gspc.co.uk, sspc.co.uk and primelocation.com.
It really is a brilliant tool if you’re looking to buy a house!
Time on market – a key indicator for the housing market?
How long it takes to sell a house is one factor that you need to consider when looking at the state of the housing market.
There’s one site that shows this data in an easy to use form. It’s at Home.co.uk – and you can drill down through local information for your area and see lots of useful information. They list the most popular estate agents according to the number of properties they’re marketing, show sold data in nice graphs and of course the Time on Market graphs.
This graph shows the Average Time On Market By Type in Oldham (days). You can search for your area using the little search box on the left too.
This shows that in January 2007 the average time on market was 125 days for all properties and now it’s 312 days. This might give hope to some people who’ve been trying to sell their house for some time.
The biggest increase has been for terraced properties which took only 88 days back in January 2007 but now sit on the market for 332 days. That’s a huge increase of 277%!
This sort of information is useful to house buyers too although there’s a more useful tool we’ll be telling you about soon called property bee that will really open up your eyes!
House for sale in Newton Surmaville
There’s a beautiful Grade 1 listed property for sale in Newton Surmaville, near Yeovil, in Somerset. It really is beautiful.
Picture 2 shows peacocks on the lawn, Picture 4 shows an amazing ceiling and it’s a wonderful house. It has fantastic gardens, a huge greenhouse and kitchen garden. It was built in 1608 by Robert Harbin who bought Newton House that was there and knocked it down and built the house that is there today!
The brochure’s first picture is of the front door which is set in a soft yellow stone buttress almost. It’s one of the prettiest houses for sale on rightmove at the moment and I’d love to take a tour round it!
The house on the British Listed building site
PrimeLocation App on the iPad
The PrimeLocation App on the iPad is easy to use.
It is free to download and use this app.
The app works in landscape mode only. The start screen has a search box for you to type in the location and to pick to buy or to rent. There are more options; this includes type of property, minimum bedrooms, maximum bedrooms, price range, search area and whether to show results in price ascending or descending.
The search has two display options – one a spiral and the other a card view. I quite like the spiral display but it’s not quite as sensible a layout to use as the card view.
You swipe the screen to change properties or click on the arrows. Whilst swiping seems to be a natural directional use for the navigation the arrows use the same directionality too. This means to see the next property you click the left arrow which to my mind is wrong… Swipe or click and view the different properties until you get to one you like. Click on the picture of the house and you’ll see the details with a link to see the full details on the primelocation site or to share the details by email.
The email contains the details and a link which is quite nice if you want to keep a record of the houses you’re interested in.
When you view the property on the primelocation site you still have an option to return to the results – this is at the bottom of the screen on the left making it easy to get back to see more properties.
Press the close button to return to more properties on the search results.
The app allows you to refine your search results but doesn’t have a map feature which many other apps do. It is an interesting way of viewing properties though.