Schutle’s data comes directly from an agency’s CRM or internal systems and tracks each property from listing to sale. When the agency records a sale, we capture the property, the sale price and the completion date automatically.

Where a government land register publishes transaction data, we match each sale against it:

• In England and Wales, we use HM Land Registry Price Paid Data.
• In Dubai, we use Dubai Land Department (DLD) records.

A sale is matched only when the property, the price and the completion date all agree with the register. Declared sales are checked against previous listings and then matched by postcode and house number or name, street address, sold price and completion date.

Registers record who bought and sold a property, at what price and on what date. They don’t include which agent handled it. We confirm the agency’s involvement using:

• the agency’s listing history in its CRM, showing it marketed the property before the sale was agreed;
• As soon as the property is under offer the agents mark it as under offer and when it exchanges the sold price and completion date are locked in our data.
• We then check this data matches with the subsequent land registry sold data confirming price and date.
• automatic checks for the same sale being claimed by more than one agency. Disputed sales are not published until resolved.

In some countries, including Spain, property sales are registered but there’s no public dataset we can match against automatically. There, we corroborate each sale using documents that confirm both the sale and the agency’s role. These may be official documents, such as a notarial deed or land registry extract, or third-party documents, such as a commission invoice or a signed agreement between agency and client.

Every certificate and badge shows its level:

Registry-verified:

sale details matched to a government land register, with agency involvement confirmed from listing history [and other checks].

Source-verified:

matched to a trusted third-party transaction dataset.

Document-verified:

sale and agency involvement confirmed from official or third-party documents.

Agency-reported:

recorded by the agency but not yet checked. We don’t publish these.

Each verified result is published as a JSON record signed by Schutle with ES256. Anyone can fetch the record and our public key and confirm that it hasn’t been altered.

• Timing: land registers publish sales weeks or months after completion, so a recent sale may show as pending until it appears.
• Exclusions: some transactions never appear in public registers. In England and Wales these include certain transfers that aren’t standard market sales. These can only be document-verified.
• What verification doesn’t cover: we confirm the sale and the agency’s involvement. We don’t rate service quality, and we don’t confirm asking prices or how long a sale took unless the certificate says so.
• Privacy: buyer and seller names are never published.

If you believe a certificate is wrong, report here. We review every report as soon as possible. Where a record turns out to be wrong, we correct or revoke the certificate, and its status updates everywhere it’s linked. Agencies cannot pay to change or remove a result.

Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2021. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.