DocsGet Started
Reading a Report
A report is easiest to interpret when you first establish its geography, observation periods and available evidence. The creation date tells you when the document was assembled, not when every transaction or rental observation occurred.
Report Identity and Scope
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Authority | The local authority the report describes. A local authority district, or LAD, is an administrative area, not a postcode or a radius around an address. |
| Classification | The authority's administrative type, such as a London borough. This is not a property-quality category. |
| Region | The broader location of the authority. A regional label does not make the report's statistics regional averages. |
| Date and Time | When the report was generated. |
| Report ID | The reference for identifying the document when sharing it or contacting support. It is distinct from an underlying data release ID. |
The Summary brings together selected indicators. A headline labelled Flat Price / m2 concerns flats, not all homes. 2-Bed Flat GIY concerns the two-bedroom flat rental segment, not the area's entire rental market.
Observation Dates and Windows
An observation month usually marks the end of a period of evidence, not activity during that month alone.
| Report measure | Period represented |
|---|---|
| Sales, traded value, trading shares and price per square metre | A rolling 12-month window ending in the stated month. |
| National price-band statistics | A rolling 12-month window, with boundaries for that observation. |
| Monthly rental estimates | A monthly estimate supported by a 12-month rental basis. |
| Rental-segment capital values | An estimate supported by 24 months of sale evidence. |
| Gross rental yield | A combination of the separately dated rental and capital estimates. |
| New-build price differential | A 36-month evidence window. |
| New-build sales, deliveries and delivery mix | A rolling 12-month window. |
| Projection | The future period labelled on the chart, under the selected assumption. |
For example, 12M to June 2026 means 1 July 2025 through 30 June 2026, inclusive. It does not mean June's sales alone. Successive monthly observations overlap: adding them together would count much of the same activity repeatedly.
Rental evidence can be more recent than sale evidence. Read both dates when using gross yield; do not assume the capital estimate is as recent as the rent. See Dates and Releases for the underlying data's reporting conventions.
Recorded Figures, Estimates and Projections
Recorded figures summarise eligible residential transactions. They are not a count of every legal transfer, listing or property in the area. Later registrations and corrections can change the recorded history.
Estimates describe typical pricing, rent, capital value or delivery activity where the market cannot be observed completely at the required level of detail. They are useful benchmarks, not exact measurements of every property in a segment.
Projections illustrate an assumption about the future. They are separate from both recorded activity and historical estimates. Changing a projection assumption does not revise the historical figures.
Coverage Indicators and Missing Figures
The contents list's Available / Total indicator counts available latest figures across the section's segments. It is not the number of properties sampled and does not count every historical point on a chart. Local Activity coverage concerns the displayed small-area fields.
The accompanying status marks summarise completeness, not market quality or the probability that a figure is correct. A fully populated section is not a guarantee of equal evidence strength across all its segments. The projection section shows its horizon rather than an evidence-coverage score.
A dash or an unavailable entry means no figure is supplied for that measure and period. It does not mean zero. A genuine zero count means no eligible activity was recorded in that selection. A percentage may still be unavailable if there is no valid denominator.
Availability can differ within a row. Rent may be shown while capital value and its dependent yield are unavailable. A new-build sales count may be present even where the price differential cannot be supplied. Read any accompanying reason rather than filling a gap from an adjacent month or another property type.
Area Score
Where an Area Score is displayed, read it with the scale and scoring definition supplied for that report. A score shown out of 100 is not a percentage return, a valuation confidence level or the probability that an investment will succeed.
Do not infer an area's affordability, affluence or suitability from the score alone. Use the detailed measures for those comparisons, and compare scores only where their definitions and scales are the same.
Revisions and Comparing Editions
A later data release can revise earlier observations as records are added or corrected. A difference between two report editions can therefore reflect a revision to the evidence, a different reporting period or a change in the market.
When comparing reports, retain the report reference and check the geography, segment, observation month, window and data release where identified. The same historical month in two different releases need not contain the same figure.
Displayed values are rounded for readability. Shares may not add to exactly 100% after rounding, and a rounded rent and capital figure may not reproduce the displayed yield to its final decimal place. Additional decimal places do not imply additional real-world certainty.