Can I just check all this myself for free?

Last updated: 2026-10-02

Quick answer

Yes. Almost all of what a pre-offer property report shows comes from free public sources — GOV.UK, HM Land Registry, the Environment Agency, the EPC register, police.uk, the British Geological Survey, the UKHSA radon map, planning.data.gov.uk — and you can read each of them yourself at no cost. On a first address with no prior familiarity, expect 6–10 hours. If that is a reasonable trade for you, do it. If it is not, our Complete at £24.99 is us doing all of it, with the human-review step and the explicit gaps, hand-reviewed and emailed within 24 hours, usually faster.

Check	Free public source	Rough time per address
Flood risk (England)	GOV.UK Long-term flood risk service; recorded flood extents on the EA DSP	15–30 min
Flood risk (Wales / Scotland)	Natural Resources Wales flood map; SEPA flood maps	15–30 min
Ground stability	British Geological Survey GeoIndex (free viewer)	20–40 min
Coal mining	Mining Remediation Authority Interactive Viewer	15–30 min
Radon	UKHSA radon potential map (search by postcode)	10 min
EPC and energy costs	EPC Register (findenergycertificate.gov.uk)	20–40 min (handling multiple certificates)
Sold-price history	HM Land Registry Price Paid (free CSV); ScotLIS in Scotland	30–60 min
Crime	police.uk by postcode (England and Wales)	15 min
Planning designations	planning.data.gov.uk (conservation area, listed building, flood zones)	30–60 min
Schools and inspections	Ofsted (England) / Estyn (Wales) / HMIE (Scotland)	30 min
Mobile and broadband	Ofcom Checker	15 min
Cross-referencing + writing it up	You — reconciling disagreements between sources	2–4 hours

Our verdict

If you have the day and want to own the knowledge, do it yourself — the datasets are free, and we link to every one of them. If you would rather spend £9.99–£24.99 to have the public record cross-referenced, human-reviewed, and the gaps named for the address, that is what we sell. Both are legitimate choices. The one we strongly discourage is skipping it entirely: offering on a house without ever reading its flood, ground or planning record is the avoidable mistake this whole industry exists to prevent.

Short on time? Buy the day back.

£24.99 Complete, one-off. 15+ public-source checks drawn from 65+ official sources, hand-reviewed and emailed within 24 hours, usually faster.

Try or search any UK postcode

£24.99 one-off · no subscription · Human-checked and emailed to you. See a sample report · Review report options and coverage

Where the real friction lives (and what you are paying us to absorb)

The headline numbers in the table above assume everything resolves cleanly. In practice, three things eat the time. First, the datasets disagree about the location: a postcode-level answer, a UPRN-level answer and a street-level answer are three different resolutions, and the EPC register, the flood map and the sold-price data each prefer a different one. Second, records are often missing — a flat with no EPC on the register, a coal area with no recorded workings, a radon result that comes back blank. Third, dates matter: an EPC from 2011 says something different about the building than one from 2024, and the current certificate is not necessarily the most recent one.

Why we still think a report is worth buying

Because every report is reviewed by a person before it is sent. That reviewer catches the dataset that returned a false blank, the certificate that is for the flat upstairs rather than the one being bought, and the mining record that is for an area the automated match placed outside the shaft radius. These are the things a fully automated screen will not catch — and they are exactly the findings a buyer most wants on their side of the offer.

What we do not pretend to do

Our report is not a legal document, not a survey, not a valuation, and not a title register. For the differences, see report vs conveyancing searches, report vs RICS survey, and what a report should cost. Every report says this on the inside front page.

Save the day. Keep the honesty.

£24.99 Complete. One-off, no subscription. The public-record screen, hand-reviewed, emailed within 24 hours, usually faster.

Try or search any UK postcode

£24.99 one-off · no subscription · Human-checked and emailed to you. See a sample report · Review report options and coverage

Frequently asked questions

Yes, most of it. The underlying data is on GOV.UK, HM Land Registry, the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales, SEPA, the EPC register, police.uk, planning.data.gov.uk, the British Geological Survey and the UK Health Security Agency's radon map. All of these are free at point of use. The question is not whether you can — you can — but whether it is a reasonable use of your time. Expect to spend 6–10 hours per address learning the datasets, cross-referencing their disagreements, and writing down what you found.

On a first address with no prior familiarity: 6–10 hours. Most of that is not reading records; it is working out which record to trust when two sources disagree, finding the right postcode-vs-outcode-vs-UPRN resolution for each dataset, and discovering which checks have no answer at your address and therefore need written down as gaps. On a second address, if you kept notes, roughly 2–3 hours. We know this because we built the pipeline — the early fetchers took weeks to make reliable, and they still break often enough that human review is a mandatory step in every report we send.

Three things. First, time — the hours above. Second, the dataset-wrangling frustration — which record is current, why the EPC register has three certificates for the same address, why the flood map returns a different answer at the postcode than at the UPRN. Third, the human-review step — a person reading the output and catching the dataset that returned a false blank or an out-of-date certificate. A report at £9.99 Lite or £24.99 Complete is us doing all three for you, in a day, with the gaps named rather than left as blanks.

A few things sit behind paywalls, licences or professionals. HM Land Registry's title register (£7) is the only source that legally names the registered owner — public portals do not show this. The formal Local Authority Search (LLC1 and CON29), the Drainage and Water Search, and the Environmental Search are legal documents that only a conveyancer can order and only they can rely on in the transaction. A physical inspection of the building is a RICS Home Survey. Everything else — the maps, the registers, the sold prices, the planning history — is yours to read, free, with time.

Start with these: GOV.UK Flood Risk check for your address; the EPC register for the energy certificate; HM Land Registry Price Paid data (free CSV) for the sold-price history on the street; police.uk for crime at the location; planning.data.gov.uk for conservation area, listed building and planning designations; the British Geological Survey's GeoIndex for ground stability; the Mining Remediation Authority's interactive viewer for coal mining; the UKHSA radon map for radon potential. In Scotland use SEPA for flooding and ScotLIS for property records. Keep a note of what each one returned, and especially of what each one could not answer.

For most buyers, yes — but on honesty grounds, not necessity grounds. You can genuinely do it yourself. The report exists because the people who have done it once often do not want to do it again on the next property, the one after that, and the two they will not end up offering on. A one-off purchase at £24.99 is a reasonable trade against a day of your time. If you would rather spend the day and own the knowledge, we are not going to argue with that — use our free postcode-area tools and the links in this guide.