How to use Land Registry completions when you are deciding what to offer — without treating a historic transfer as today’s valuation.
An asking price is a starting position on an advert. A sold price is the consideration written into a completed transfer and later published in Price Paid Data. Mixing the two is how people talk themselves into overpaying, or into assuming a seller will never move.
On Agency Free the asking price lives on the listing. The completion history, where we have it, sits beside that listing as nearby transfers. Read them in that order: what is being asked today, then what actually completed close by, then whether the home in front of you is genuinely comparable.
Match beds, type, tenure and the last 400 metres of the street before you lean on a number. A refurbished terrace on one side of a main road is not the same asset as an unmodernised terrace on the other, even when both postcodes start the same way.
Leasehold flats need a second filter: remaining term, service charge, and whether the sale was of a similar length lease. Price Paid will not warn you about a short lease. The advert and the lease will.
There is a delay between completion and publication. A quiet street can look cheaper than it is if the last recorded sale is eighteen months old and two similar houses have since gone under offer. Conversely, a cluster of sales in one month can look like a new local ceiling when it was simply three similar houses moving at once.
If the recent completions sit well below the asking price, ask why. Work done, a bigger plot, or a seller testing the market are all legitimate answers — they are just answers you should hear from the person listing the home, not invent from a chart.
When the advert is from the owner, there is no branch script sitting between you and the number. That is useful. It also means you should be precise: which completions you looked at, why this house is or is not like them, and how quickly you can exchange. A clean offer with evidence from sold prices is easier to take seriously than a round figure with no trail.
Sources and limits
This note is Agency Free original writing. Completions are HM Land Registry Price Paid records we store. They are not the ONS House Price Index and not a valuation. Legal process described here is general information, not advice for your transaction.