About RealScout

Why it exists

A house price on its own says little: a £450,000 flat and a £450,000 house are not the same purchase. Dividing the price actually paid by the floor area actually measured puts every sold home on one scale, and that scale is how most of Europe already talks about property. The public data to compute it, every registered sale since 1995, and an energy certificate with a floor area for most homes, has existed for years. What did not exist was a place where anyone could read the result for their own postcode district without downloading a 5 GB file. RealScout is that place.

Who runs it

RealScout is built and run by Olivier Bildstein, its founder, and is part of Matera Capital Limited, a company registered in England (Companies House no. 17008036). Olivier writes the articles that carry his byline, maintains the data pipeline, and is the person who answers contact@materacapital.com. There is no separate editorial team, and the site says "we" rather than inventing one.

How the figures are produced

Every figure follows the same route: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data supplies the sale (price, date, address); the Energy Performance of Buildings Register supplies the floor area; the two are matched on address; and the published figure is the median of price ÷ area over a stated window, rounded to three significant figures. Sales that cannot be matched to a floor area are still counted and listed; they are excluded only from the per-square-metre ratio. The methodology page documents every rule, including the ones that limit us: EPC floor areas are recorded to the whole square metre, exclude garages, and are imperfect; thin samples are suppressed rather than published; registrations lag sales by 2–8 weeks.

The rules the site holds itself to

• Every count states its time window. A number without a window is not published.
• A count printed beside a figure is that figure's own denominator: matched sales beside a £/m² median, all sales beside a sale-price median.
• Precision is honest: three significant figures, because a median over a few dozen sales cannot support more.
• Caveats live beside the figures they qualify, not in a footnote nobody reads.
• The same number is identical on the page, in the JSON and in the CSV: one rounding rule, applied once.
• RealScout does not value property, and says so on every page.

The data is yours too

Everything RealScout publishes is derived from open data released under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and what it publishes carries the same licence: the free dataset page has the downloads and a ready-made citation. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Corrections

The most useful thing a reader can send is a correction. If a figure looks wrong, say which area and what you expected; it gets checked against the underlying sales, and what needs fixing gets fixed in the next monthly rebuild.