How to check if an asking price is fair, in about ten minutes

An asking price is a proposal, not a fact. The seller’s agent has priced for the best realistic buyer on a good day, and sometimes for a better one than that. The record of what buyers actually paid for nearby homes, per square metre, is public, and reading a listing against it takes about ten minutes. Here is the whole method, with nothing left out.

Step 1: get the floor area from the EPC, not the listing

Listings describe space with photographs and adjectives. The Energy Performance Certificate records it as a number, the total internal floor area in square metres, and nearly every home that has been sold or let since 2008 has one. Search the address on the government’s Energy Performance of Buildings Register (it is free and takes a minute). If the listing quotes square feet, divide by 10.7639. Where the two disagree, prefer the EPC, and if the gap is large, that is your first question for the agent, not a detail: EPC areas have known limitations, but a 15 m² difference is a red flag either way.

Step 2: divide

Asking price ÷ floor area. A £425,000 flat of 68 m² is £6,250/m². This is thirty seconds with a phone calculator and it converts the listing from a story into a number that can be compared.

Step 3: read it against the district

Open the district page for the outward code, SW11, M4, whatever the address starts with, and put your number against two figures: the median, and the middle 60% of matched sales (the p20–p80 band).

Every district page also has a percentile tool that does this arithmetic for you: type the price and floor area and it places the home among the area’s own sales. The point is not the exact percentile. The point is which of three zones you are in: below the median, inside the middle, or above the 80th percentile, where the burden of proof moves to the seller.

Step 4: check the trend before you stretch

A price that looks full against today’s market reads differently in a rising one and worse in a falling one. Each district page charts ten years of quarterly medians, in cash and in inflation-adjusted terms, and the two often disagree. In E14, prices over the last ten years moved −0.8% a year in cash and −4.1% a year after inflation. In LS6, Meanwood in Leeds, the same decade ran +5.8% a year in cash, +2.3% real. The cash figure is what the market did and the real one is what it did to your money, and stretching 10% over the median means something different against each pair.

Step 5: name the premium or negotiate it away

If the home prices above its district’s middle band, list what justifies it, a garden, parking, a new roof, an unusually good street, and check the listing and survey actually support each item. What is left unexplained is the negotiation. Agents expect this conversation; the data just means you arrive with the local record instead of a feeling.

What can this method not tell you?

It compares a home to its market. It does not know about the loft conversion, the short lease or the motorway behind the garden, and none of the figures here are a valuation of any individual home. What it reliably does is stop you anchoring on the asking price, which is the one number in the process chosen by the person you are negotiating against.

Start with the district: search any postcode above, or browse areas by region. The figures are medians of HM Land Registry sold prices matched to EPC floor areas, August 2026 dataset, rebuilt monthly, method documented in full.