Asking prices are marketing. Sold prices are facts. Before you exchange on a property — or even before you make an offer — here's how to use HM Land Registry data to check whether what you're being asked to pay reflects what the street actually trades at.
Why asking prices don't tell the whole story
Estate agents set asking prices to attract interest and anchor negotiation — not to reflect fair market value. The actual figure that matters is the price a willing buyer and a willing seller agreed on, registered at completion, and submitted to HM Land Registry.
That registered figure is public record. It covers every residential sale in England and Wales since 1995, updated monthly. Street-level aggregation of that data — medians, year-on-year changes, transaction volumes — gives you a benchmark that no agent's valuation can credibly argue with.
What to look for: four signals
Search the property's postcode. Locate the street in the results. The median price is your anchor — it's the midpoint of all sales on that street, not pulled up by outliers. If the asking price is significantly above the street median for the same property type, you need a clear reason why (larger plot, extended, top-floor flat with a view — something specific and verifiable).
The year-on-year percentage change tells you whether the street is appreciating or declining. A street showing consecutive negative YoY figures is a market signal — prices have been falling, and there's no rational basis to pay a premium above recent comps. A rising street with strong transaction volume gives sellers more justification for an ambitious ask.
A terraced house and a detached house on the same street can differ by hundreds of thousands of pounds. Use the property type filter — Terraced, Semi-Detached, Detached, Flat / Maisonette — to narrow the data to genuinely comparable sales. Like-for-like comparison is everything; mixed-type medians are a starting point, not a conclusion.
New builds typically sell at a premium of 15–25% above equivalent existing stock on the same street, partly due to developer marketing and Help to Buy effects. If the data shows a new-build premium on your street, factor that in when comparing your target property to historical sales — and remember, new builds can be harder to resell at that premium in an open market.
A worked example
Say you're looking at a terraced house on a street in SW11, asking £725,000. Here's what the data might show:
| Year |
Street median (Terraced) |
YoY change |
Sales |
| 2025 |
£648,000 |
−2.4% |
6 |
| 2024 |
£664,000 |
−1.8% |
9 |
| 2023 |
£676,000 |
−0.9% |
7 |
Verdict: The street median for terraced properties is £648,000 in the most recent year — £77,000 below the asking price. The trend is negative three years running, with no recovery signal. Unless the specific property has material improvements above comparables, £725,000 is hard to justify on the data.
What "overpaying" actually means
Paying above the street median isn't automatically wrong. If the property is extended, recently renovated, or on a particularly desirable section of the street, a premium can be rational. What you're doing with this data is making that premium explicit and deliberate — not invisible and assumed.
The question changes from "is this a fair price?" (unanswerable without data) to "what premium am I paying, and what's my specific justification for it?" That's a much stronger position to negotiate from — and to walk away from, if you can't answer it.
Before you instruct a surveyor
A full structural survey will tell you about condition. It won't tell you whether the price reflects the market. Do your sold price research first — if the data suggests significant overpricing, the surveyor's valuation should confirm or challenge it, and you'll be better placed to negotiate downward based on their report.