Digital tools for house hunting around England and London

The past few months have been busy for me! I have been trying to sell my house and find somewhere new to live. In September, I had an offer accepted on an awesome place (woop woop!). Assuming the sale doesn’t fall through (a big assumption in England), and assuming this is actually my forever home (also a big assumption), I will not be looking at Zoopla or Rightmove again for quite a while.

This feels like a shame, as in recent years figuring out places where I might want to live has become a favourite hobby of mine. I have an app called Freedom on all my devices that keeps me off news and social media. But I didn’t set it up to block property websites, so that is where I have tended to go when I enter the dark playground of infinite scroll and procrastination.

Over the years, I have also found a fair number of other digital tools that have helped me decide which part of England to live in, and which properties are most suited to me. This post summarises the ones that I have found to be most useful. If you think of any good ones that I have missed, get in touch and I will add them to the list.

Digital tools I like to use

Travel Time is a great app that allows you to see at a glance which places are within a reasonable distance of London stations. My aim was to get further out of London and nearer to the South West of England (my parents live in Dorset and there are excellent beaches down there)! I also needed to be within easy commuting distance of London for work.

Traffic noise is something I can’t stand. Extrium shows noise from cars and trains on a map. Fast cars are the worst in my opinion, so this map of speed limits comes in handy too.

Aeroplane noise isn’t as bad as cars, but I did not want to live under a flight path. Flight Radar is a good app to check out if this matters to you.

Flood risk is sadly likely to become more of a thing in my lifetime. This urban water map is useful for checking out London properties. I was not able to find a UK-wide map of flood risk, so I tended to use this height above sea level map as a substitute. GOV.UKs check the long term flood risk for an area in England is the place I go for a more detailed look once I have a specific property in mind, as it only works with specific postcodes.

Air pollution is a thing if you are living in London. London Air‘s annual pollution maps give a good sense of which places to avoid. TLDR: avoid busy roads!

One of the questions I usually ask when looking for a house is what the opportunities for future expansion are. Google Earth is a great tool for quickly checking whether neighbours have done loft or rear extensions. Local council planning websites are useful for a more detailed look. You can read planning documents from the applications of previous owners or neighbours.

As I approached my forties, gardening became a favourite hobby of mine. Good plants don’t like lots of shade. ShadeMap gives you an idea of how much light a garden will get at different times of day/year.

Zoopla and Rightmove often advertise houses without the address. This is annoying as most of my questions above can be answered quickly by knowing the exact location of the property. If I can’t make out the house number from the photo, I use Google Streetview to figure out the address from what the front of the house looks like.

Pro-tip for Zoopla and Rightmove: occasionally scan through saved searches for places that have quietly become available again. If a house goes off the market and then comes on again soon after/without a big price change (eg. because a sale collapsed), users will not get automatically notified. There will be less competition for properties like this unless the agent is particularly well-connected with potential buyers in the area via other listings.

When deciding what offer to make, Zoopla’s sold house price predictions give a useful idea of how much the property might be worth. Rightmove just shows the historical sale price, but Zoopla shows the sale price plus their estimate of how much it’s worth now. The feature has been nerfed recently, and now you have to click a lot before you can find the Zoopla estimate of a property, but it is still better than nothing.

Do yourself a favour and get a decent conveyancer

Once your offer is accepted, finding a good conveyancer is critical. Buying a house is one of the most stressful things you will ever do, and it is one of those times when it really is worth paying a little bit more for a pro to get it done for you. I highly recommend Juno to anyone who will listen. The first time I bought a property I went for someone cheap. The whole process took months longer than it needed to, and I drowned in legal terminology and printed bits of paper. Juno was recommended to me by ex-colleagues on GOV.UK. Like GOV.UK, they have gone to a real effort to explain complex services in a simple way, More recently, they have built an easy-to-use portal which looks a bit like a blue version of a GOV.UK service. I am hoping we can both make £75 from Juno’s referral scheme now!