The price tracker answers one specific question: what would a property be worth now, given what it sold for then? It starts from a real transaction, either a registered sale found in HM Land Registry data or a purchase price and date you enter yourself, and carries that figure forward using the official UK House Price Index.
The House Price Index measures how prices in an area have actually moved, with a series running back to 1995. Applying it to a known sale price is the most defensible way to project a current value, because it builds on a price a real buyer paid rather than stacking an estimate on top of an estimate. The index is applied locally, so a flat in one borough is not tracked against a national average that has nothing to do with it.
Indexation on its own assumes the property never changed, which is rarely true across a long hold. You can layer adjustments on top: improvements such as an extension, loft conversion, new kitchen or off-street parking, and detriments such as flood risk, a short lease, cladding issues or subsidence. Each carries its own weighting and, where it matters, the date it took effect, so the projection describes the property as it stands rather than as it was bought.
Every projection can be saved and revisited, and a what-if scenario re-runs the same property under different assumptions without overwriting the original. What indexation cannot see is the current market’s appetite for one specific home, which is why the tracker sits alongside the valuation tool rather than replacing it.
HM Land Registry Price Paid Data for the original sale, and the UK House Price Index for the movement since. Both are official public datasets, not estimates scraped from listings.
The House Price Index series starts in 1995, so any sale from then onward can be carried forward to the present day, which is over thirty years of movement.
HM Land Registry publishes a sale only once it has completed and been registered, and that lags the transaction by several months. If a property changed hands very recently, enter the price and date manually and the tracker will index from there.
No, and the difference matters. The tracker projects a known past price forward using an index. The valuation tool estimates a price from comparable evidence and returns a confidence range. They answer different questions and are often worth running on the same property.
Source: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data and UK House Price Index, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Coverage is England and Wales.