What free street and area directories show, and what an address-level report adds

Run the free street check

The same kind of area read a directory gives you, with the source and the resolution under every number. Type the street's postcode:

What a street directory is good at

Choosing an area. The directories are built from the census, police.uk, HM Land Registry and Ofcom, and they turn those into a readable profile of a street: who lives there, what it sells for, how much crime is recorded, how fast the broadband is, which schools are near. For a buyer who does not know a town, that is a real service, and the good ones are free because the data is.

Where the street stops being the right unit

Everything that goes expensively wrong in a purchase is specific to the house. A street can be half in Flood Zone 3 and half out. One side can sit on London Clay rated Significant for shrink-swell and the other on gravel. Two identical terraces can have EPCs twenty years apart, one with a cavity-wall insulation note the survey will want to see. The sale history that matters is this property's, not the street average, and the planning label that matters is whether this building is in the conservation area, not whether the area has one. A street profile has no cell for any of that, and nowhere to record that a check was tried and returned nothing.

What the address-level report adds

The Complete report keeps the area picture (A plain-English picture of the place; Every census category with count and share, including household tenure; Walkability out of 100 and every everyday amenity counted, with the nearest named) and adds the layers a directory cannot hold: Mapped zone, surface water now and 2050s, named warning areas, recorded events, climate allowances, Flood Re; Coal, clay shrink-swell to the 2070s, landslide records, radon band and ground level; Former landfill within 1 km to its boundary, permitted landfill within 2 km, incidents, permits de-duplicated by site; Every recorded sale on the street with tenure and new-build flags, plus area averages by type; The whole certificate: every rated element, costs now and after, every costed improvement; Conservation areas and every listed building within 700 m, with grade and distance. It closes with A numbered brief built from what this address flagged and a before-you-offer checklist. Every section prints where the address has usable data, and a check that could not be run is named rather than scored as a pass. The full table of contents is on Lite vs Complete.

Reading any street statistic honestly

• Crime is snapped to anonymised map points and reflects footfall and reporting as much as offending; a busy high street records more than a cul-de-sac for that reason alone. Read the category mix and the trend, not the headline.
• Price averages mix flats, terraces and detached houses. The number that matters is what homes like the one you want sold for, and when, which is why the report prints every recorded sale with its type and tenure.
• Census figures are from 2021 and describe an output area of roughly a hundred and twenty-five households, not your prospective neighbours.
• Broadband speeds are predicted for the premises, not measured; a line to the exchange can be long on a short street.