London, 29 November 2007: DotHomes.com (‘DotHomes’), the property search engine, has today announced the launch of its Property Price Tracker. This freely available performance assessment tool enables property owners, prospective buyers, investors, developers, vendors, estate agents and other property market participants to assess and compare the values of property assets and the performance of them over time.
The new Property Price Tracker service introduced by DotHomes provides property owners with an accurate guide to how their property investments have performed over time against a wide range of variable market data, including average national property prices, average London property prices, FTSE100 indices and Bank of England base rates. In addition, it allows prospective buyers to assess and compare property prices and returns on investment in different geographical locations.
The Property Price Tracker works by estimating property price fluctuations based on the asking prices of comparable properties, together with historical data from several sources, principally mortgage lending companies. These historical data sources record the sold prices of properties over time, and adjust the prices according to variations in property characteristics such as number of bedrooms, number of floors, property type, the existence of a garden or off-street parking. This is significantly more instructive than the sold-price data provided by the Land Registry, which does not take into account property characteristics*.
The tracked information, which is presented graphically on the DotHomes Website, includes both absolute figures and return-on-investment percentages presented in the style of the equity and currency charts used on financial trading floors.
DotHomes.com, which was formerly known as Extate, is a property search engine which uses an innovative ‘Google-type’ approach to property search. The engine uses ‘robots’ to search widely for estate agency listings and then extracts and sorts (or ‘parses’) key information and produces easy-to-read summaries that link directly through to estate agents’ original listings. DotHomes provides property hunters with an easier and more transparent online property search mechanism, which is entirely free, and estate agents with a free and effortless marketing platform.
Douglas de Jager, co-founder of BytePlay, DotHomes’ parent company, said of the Property Price Tracker: “This new, innovative service brings a richness and quality of information to anyone involved in the property market, providing users of DotHomes with an accurate guide to the performance of either individual properties or property portfolios. It can also provide home buyers with a guide to property performance in areas they are considering purchasing a property and we believe it will prove to be an invaluable tool in helping anyone involved in the buying and selling property to make crucial property investment decisions.”
