House Price Sales On The Internet

[Khandro]

I have just sold a property (STC) in the UK and don't particularly want the selling price broadcast on those 'Price Comparison' sites. Can this be prevented? How do they get this information? The only people savvy to what a property actually sells for would seem to be the buyer and seller, the solicitors. (professionally bound to secrecy) and the estate agents. So presumably it must be the latter, is that correct please?

[Maydup]

Is it released via the Land Registry?

http://www.landregistry.gov.uk/public/faqs/why-is-information-about-the-price-i-paid-for-my-house-on-the-internet

[Khandro]

Maydup; Thank you, I disagree with this policy completely, but I see there is nothing one can do to prevent disclosure. As long as everything is done legally and all taxes etc, paid, I feel a sale arranged by two people should remain their own business. Another example of yet more state interference into our private lives.

[buildersmate]

This is not new and it has been possible to find the price paid by paying for a copy of the LR title register since about 2000. It is also possible to find the registered proprietor and a host of other useful info.
What is new is organisations such as Zoopla paying for and routinely scraping the LR database of recent transactions and hence making the information vastly more available to the mass market.

[Khandro]

Do you know if it was a New Labour initiative, sounds rather like it.
It seems to disadvantage sellers by not properly comparing like with like.

[buildersmate]

The link provided by Maydup suggests April 2000 so that is firmly in Blair time.
I think it is useful info, but what is pathetic is the attempt to extrapolate current values from that data since you have to take into account improvements and modifications.
More than a dozen years ago I know of a bungalow bought as a demolition / rebuild job. The Rightmove / Zoopla value shows it as worth about 2x the earlier value in today's money. In fact it is worth about 4x. The web scrapers update the property type as Detached Semi Terraced Tec plus correct number of bedrooms, but fail to realise the property valuation based on extrapolation I'd drivel.
A little bit of knowledge is more misleading than no knowledge at all.
Use the raw data but don't rely on such organisations to draw correct conclusions.

[dzug2]

..I feel a sale arranged by two people should remain their own business. Another example of yet more state interference into our private lives. ..

It's the state trying to ensure the market is more competitive by making knowledge about prices more widely known.

[Khandro]

dzug2: What on earth has a deal between two individuals, whether it be a car, a house, or a goat, got to do with the state ?

[dzug2]

Very briefly: the State believes in free markets - or professes to anyway.

free markets work best when the parties to contracts have full knowledge of the market - that includes knowledge about similar transactions

So it makes such knowledge available.

Standard economic theory.

[Peter Pedant]

Maydup - quite right... Housing association sales - half and half houses may show up as just half the price.

even when they were sold at full whackeroo...
and when I emailed the comparison site - there is no point in implying there are houses for sale for £40k when there arent - I got an incredibly snotty automated reply involving the Land Registry, receipts and statutory declarations predicated on the certainty they had to be right and I had to be wrong.

[Peter Pedant]

// So it makes such knowledge available.

Standard economic theory. //

standard economic fact innit ? markets are not more efficient when you er dont know the prices ...blimey do people publish papers on that sort of thing ?