CURIOSITY, IT SEEMS, may no longer kill the cat. Since the end of last month the cat will instead know exactly what you paid for your house, whose name is on the title deeds and also who holds a mortgage or any other interest over your home. For a couple of pounds, several websites, including the Land Registry itself, mean that Mr and Mrs Nosy Parker next door can tell if you are lying when you tell them you bought the house for a song — or indeed if your local estate agent is lying when he tells you that a similar house round the corner sold for a small fortune and yours should go on the market for the same.
Unfortunately for the Parkers, these websites are limited in their reach. For example, their house might have five bedrooms and a loft conversion, while yours could have only three: until now, websites such as myhouseprice.com made no distinction between the two, making the value of the information rather limited, unless you have bought a property on a new development, in which case you can find out which of your neighbours screwed the best deal out of the builder — although what use the knowledge will then be is rather a moot point.
Hometrack, which provides the most in-depth and independent surveys of house prices and market trends, has just launched a new website, www.realtimevaluation.co.uk, which takes online house-hunting to the next level. Using comparables from sales and valuations on properties in your immediate area — metres rather than miles — both buyers and sellers will get sheets of information on trends such as ratios between achieved and asking prices, time to sell, number of viewings before an offer is made, the number of buyers and instructions registered per month and market activity and demand in the area, right down to the ethnic, marital and age-range breakdown of the population. Your property is valued against other similar properties in the area that have been sold or valued recently, and all the data is aggregated by the Hometrack price index to give you the best estimate for a value at that day’s date.
Realtime is an automated valuation model (AVM) that is so sophisticated that not only can Mr and Mrs Parker find out how many bedrooms and what type of footplate your house has, but a mortgage lender can also use the system to decide whether or not to grant you a mortgage on the spot, negating the need to send out a surveyor. Hometrack recently signed up its 50th lender to the scheme — good news for those who have found the house of their dreams and want a mortgage offer on the spot rather than waiting for the surveyor’s report — but not such great news for the surveying industry, surely.
Mark Witherspoon, chief executive of Hometrack, says this is not the case. “Initially, surveyors were very nervous about our work but there are three key factors that mitigate against the demise of the valuer. First, as good as our technology is, the reality is that an AVM could only cover somewhere around 80 per cent of the UK property market to a level of acceptable accuracy on just the bricks and mortar element.
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“Second, for a lender there is also the credit quality of the borrower, loan amount/purpose and overall risk to take into account. Finally, with the Housing Act 2004 having received Royal Assent, there has been a realisation that there would not have been enough surveyors to cover the valuation requirements of the market anyway and therefore AVMs will form an integrated part of the new process. So although the market for physical valuations will shrink, this will be more than compensated for by the new requirement for Home Condition Reports that form part of the Home Information Packs. It does not make sense that there is going to be no demand for human experience, skill and judgment in the future.”
Hometrack’s results so far have shown that in about 50 per cent of all mortgage applications the lender will no longer need to commission a surveyor’s visit. But which of us would feel confident enough to buy a house that had not been checked over by a surveyor? Jeremy Leaf, a spokesman for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, agrees. “In theory, it sounds marvellous,” he said. “But in practice it really only works in cases such as when there is a lot of equity in the property, for example. It could be a useful guide for lenders, but there is no real substitute for going and looking physically at a property. You could have a flat above a shop, for example, which only when you go and look at it reveals that the shop is actually a lap-dancing club. Online valuations can’t spot structural faults, or if there is a problem family or commercial neighbour next door.”
We may have some way to go before we can buy and sell at the click of a mouse, but for those who want to look for a property, weigh up how the market is moving in their area — or simply see if their house is worth more than the Parkers’ — there has never been a better time to get online.
catherine.riley@thetimes.co.uk