Data has been freely released giving access to Energy Performance Certificates for homes built, sold or let since 2008 – and it could prove useful to agents and valuers.
The information gives the floor areas of the properties which, if cross-referenced with house price data, yields the average price per square foot in any particular area.
Neil Hudson, director of Residential Analysts and previously associate director in the research department at Savills, has made full use of the data sets.
He has created a map of London showing, by colour coding, the range of prices per square foot – anything from below £300 (almost impossible to spot on his map but at any rate on the peripheries of the city), to the white heat of £1,000 spread over a surprisingly large area in central London.
We have been using floor areas on EPC’s to compare properties for years. You are of course reliant on the calculations of the assessor being accurate!
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What is the relevance? Certainly no way of valuing property for marketing or insurance reinstatement.
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I think it is a great way of telling that 5 bedroom house, that they are nothing like the 5 bedroom house around the corner that are trying to compete with. Like AgentV been using it for years, EPCs just made it that bit easier to number crunch quicker.
Also useful to put a spin on the most expensive house in an area (in terms of asking price) being one of the best value homes (based on pound per square foot)… so for marketing, I think it can be useful personally… just my view.
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I totally agree Ric, did just what you said on a valuation yesterday. I showed a potential vendor that a similar condition local detached property sold for £75,000 more than I was suggesting, because it had 50 per cent more floor area!
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‘Certainly no way of valuing property’?
Sorry Will. Try telling that to any London agent – where they have been using square footage as a valuation tool for decades.
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For those old enough to remember this is how property used to be valued and still is with commercial properties. However the market has adopted a different approach with varied assessments and at the final conclusion of value, size does matter but the quality is what counts.
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Raw data can hugely inform in agency but cannot (as yet) be used in isolation. Property data is dangerously easy to misrepresent without intelligent human interpretation.
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Looking at the square footage areas given by the EPC assessors, and having used floor plans and square footage since the mid 1990’s, I’ve yet to see the areas given by floor planners and energy assessors agree. In fact when I asked the energy assessor about this it was admitted they don’t work on the gross internal square foot area of the property.
Using the areas supplied by the assessors could be rather misleading.
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Assessors work on net area (depending on heated habitable areas) so most of the time the integral garage and conservatory etc will be cut out of the area quoted on an epc whereas the floor plan software will quote the total of literally everything you can see on the plan – hence why there’s always a big difference.
As others have stated, I’ve used epc sqft as another tool to help jusitfy a price stated top a homeowner, whether they listen or not is another matter entirely…
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