The media is full of property statistics, but the reality is that not all of them are either meaningful or useful to you, and it’s often the most extreme figures that are selected simply to make attention-grabbing headlines.

The first thing to recognise is that national and even regional averages will almost always be irrelevant to you and your personal investment. The ‘property market’ is made up of thousands of micro-markets and what’s happening to the price, rent and demand for a flat in one street can be very different to what’s going on with a house even just a few hundred yards away. An average price or percentage can be the result of a lot of figures from each end of a wide scale, with very few properties in the middle, meaning that average can sometimes be downright unrepresentative of property activity in an area.

Here are the top 6 property statistics sources we think are worth following to get a pretty good idea of what’s happening now and what’s likely to happen in the future:

Your local property agent
The best people to speak to are your local agents. They might have their own price and rental updates that you can subscribe to, or they may just be happy for you to pop in for a chat and they can explain what’s happening in your local market now.

Zoopla
They produce one of the best indices for prices (monthly) and rents (quarterly). Their data is fairly up to date, but the real benefit is they have information that’s individual to cities.

They are also producing some excellent supply and demand data and give some great insights into trends, such as flats typically not performing as well as houses price-wise.

Savills
They are very good at creating in-depth price forecasts by region, and rental data and forecasts across the board as well as for London and the prime market. They also do one-off research, such as checking which Local Authorities have produced Local Plans, how people can afford the rising cost of mortgages and whether buy to let is still a good investment.

Hamptons
Over the last few years, Hamptons have produced some excellent analysis that is incredibly helpful to landlords, including whether landlords are really selling up, and how many landlords will struggle to afford their rental property with the rise in mortgage rates during 2023.

Propertychecklists.co.uk
They don’t do huge amounts of their own research but provide expert analysis and reports on all of the different indices, such as Rightmove, Zoopla and the Land Registry. They explain what’s happening according to the indices, but then also help you understand the flaws in headline data – for example, they look at average prices by cities and then find the ‘cheapest’ and most ‘expensive’ to show that property can be affordable, even when average prices are high.

They also analyse the Land Registry data and rental information by city – covering 30 every month - so are a great source of more localised data.

Propcast
If you want to know whether the market for buying and selling property is ‘hot’ or not, this is a great site that shows you what’s happening by postcode. It’s easy to access, free and gives you a good idea of whether now might be a bad or good time to buy or sell.