How NewHomeSearch works it out

A new-build premium the method is not sure of is no longer shown as one figure. At Low confidence a home’s price card, its premium section and the premium tool now give only the range, with the reason beside it: a home at Hill Top View in Melton with no stated floor area, which caps the estimate at Low, read “Asks 74% above similar resales after offers”, and now reads “Asks 45% to 84% above similar resales after offers, low confidence”. At Medium or High the figure stays, with its confidence named, and a Medium estimate says which limit of the High tier it missed. The premium tool now opens on the typical home nearest the median price whose estimate is Medium or High, where it opened on a Low one.

An asking price above £50 million is now read as a placeholder, as one below £10,000 already was, and the home is priced on application. Taylor Wimpey listed a home at Deben Park, Brightwell Lakes for £99,999,999 on the portal, so England’s prices read “from £60,899 to £99,999,999” and the home showed £503,694 a month. A placeholder is no longer a first price or a price change either, so it cannot make a reduction, and a portal listing at under £10,000 is priced on application as a builder’s plot is.

Your First Home has a tool: the new homes for sale under each council’s price cap, which GOV.UK published for all 296 councils in England on 3 November 2026, and for a price the deposit, the 20% equity loan, the mortgage and what each costs a month, with GOV.UK’s worked example as its test (£1,248 a month on £232,500 at 5% over 30 years). The mortgage is illustrated at the Bank of England’s average quoted rate for its own loan to value (an 85% series for a 2.5% deposit, as lenders price by band), where the other tools use the range. A home is counted under a cap as the place’s results page counts it, so the two numbers agree; a shared ownership home has no price of its own and is never counted. The scheme check now says a price above every cap (£650,000) fails and one within every cap (£215,000) passes, where it had said no home could be checked.

The chat now answers which schools are near the homes for sale, from England’s register of schools with Ofsted’s outcomes: Outstanding or good schools, primaries or secondaries, girls’ or boys’ schools, and grammar schools, which the register marks as selecting by ability, with the councils and towns they are in. Asking for homes near Outstanding schools or a grammar school now ranks the homes by the nearest such school, where before the wish was kept but ranked nothing. Outstanding means the overall grade of a graded inspection, which Ofsted stopped giving in 2024; catchment boundaries and admission cut-offs are not held, and a place is never promised.

A home or development whose point lies more than a kilometre from its own postcode is now placed at its postcode, and a builder’s own development joins the portal’s at the same postcode when their names agree, however far apart the two put it. Some 55 sites had two pages, one with the portal’s homes and one with the builder’s, because one of the two pins was 3 to 7 km out: Taylor Wimpey’s Showell Nurseries near Chippenham was 3.6 km from SN15 2GX on the portal, and Barratt, David Wilson and Redrow’s Alconbury Weald, Wintringham and Winnycroft were split the same way. Each is now one page with every home, on the map where its postcode is.

A school is never given the Ofsted outcome of the school it replaced. Ofsted’s data lists a predecessor’s inspection against a new academy or merged school, and about 1,400 schools had been shown one as their own, such as an academy that opened in 2024 showing the Inadequate its predecessor was given in 2023. Such a school now shows as not yet inspected, with its predecessor’s outcome beside it, named as the predecessor’s and dated, and it is not counted in any Ofsted tally.

How fast homes are selling, and each place’s line on the home page, now cover the last 12 whole months and leave out the month just begun. A few days of a new month beside full ones read as a collapse: on 2 November, Wiltshire’s chart ended on an almost empty November. A month’s homes join the chart once it ends.

How prices spread now bands the cheapest 95% of a place’s or builder’s homes, and the dearest few share one last band, such as “£750K and over”, when they would otherwise stretch the chart over empty bands: Wiltshire’s ran to £1.6M for six homes, leaving most of the chart blank. Each band is named on the axis where it starts. Every home is still counted, in its band and in the table.

A home taken from its builder’s own site now has a listed day only when the site first saw it after following that builder for a week. A home already for sale when the site began reading the builder’s pages was new to the site, not newly listed, so it no longer reads as listed that week, counts in “new this week”, or swells the month it was first seen in how fast homes are selling (Wiltshire showed some 400 homes listed in October, the month the builders’ sites were first read). Homes from the portals keep the day they were first published.

The premium now gives figures. Each month its method is tested on resales whose price is already known, in the neighbourhoods of new-build developments across England and Wales: each is valued from the sales before it, as a new home would be, and the confidence tiers and the point of refusal are set from the error measured. Every home’s page now shows its premium against similar resales, after the builder’s cash offers too, with how sure it is, or why there is no figure.

Two development names now agree only by their own words: an estate’s generic ones, such as Gardens, Green, Fields, Quarter, Grange or Place, no longer count, so Persimmon’s Orchid Gardens is no longer folded into its sold-out Saffron Gardens, nor Taylor Wimpey’s Elmwood Grange into Hartburn Grange. A builder’s development goes with the one whose name it carries most, not one it shares an area name with (David Wilson Homes’ Canal Quarter at Kingsbrook, not Orchard Green at Kingsbrook), and of several claiming one, those carrying less of its name keep pages of their own (Redrow’s Roman Green beside Emperor Park in Kings Moat Garden Village). Phases named for a site still join it (Franklin Gardens at Darwin Green).

A builder’s development close to one the portal lists no longer folds into it when another of the builder’s own developments carries that name and its own name is different: it keeps a page of its own (Esquire’s sold-out Foxglove Mews, 120 metres from Farriers Green). A builder’s development whose name agrees with a nearby one now joins that one before a nearer one whose name does not, and a development’s page leads with the builder’s record named for it, its words, pictures, sales office and links.

What the adults around a home do is drawn again, from HomePortfolio’s rebuild of the Census 2021 economic activity table (TS066), each part a share of the residents aged 16 and over. Students are the ones neither in work nor looking for it: a working or job-seeking student is counted once, in work or looking for work.

Your First Home, the equity loan for first-time buyers of new-build homes in England confirmed at Budget 2026, has its page with the rules published so far, each in GOV.UK’s words: a 2.5% deposit, a 20% loan interest free for 5 years, the income limits. It is marked not open yet, and the check says no home can be confirmed until the price caps by council area are published. What replaced Help to Buy shows it apart from the schemes open today.

A Lifetime ISA used for a home above its £450,000 price cap now costs a 20% withdrawal charge, where it had cost 25%, from 29 October 2026 (Budget 2026). The scheme pages and a home’s scheme check say so, with the charge as a condition rather than a reason the savings cannot be used.

The cash tool now opens on a home in Scotland or Wales and counts its own nation’s tax, LBTT or LTT, where it had started from a typical English home instead; its legal fees allowance says it is England and Wales’s in Scotland. The premium has no resale sales for a home in Scotland, and says so. The middle asking price on a place page is rounded to the pound before its tax is worked out, so the tax question no longer drops out where the middle falls between two prices.

A home in Scotland now shows its Land and Buildings Transaction Tax and a home in Wales its Land Transaction Tax, from Revenue Scotland’s and the Welsh Revenue Authority’s published rates, where they had said the tax was not worked out here. Scotland’s first-time buyers pay nothing on the first £175,000; Wales has no first-time buyer relief. Place pages answer the tax question in their own nation, the chat costs these homes with their own tax, and a “stamp duty paid” offer is capped at the tax due where the home is.

The premium tool now reads whether a home is detached, semi-detached, terraced or a flat from its listing, where it had told every house that its builder did not say. It reads the resale sales and the repeat-sales index it would compare against from HomePortfolio as each home is opened, and gives a figure once the backtest sets its method; until then it says that is what it waits on.

A home’s monthly figure now adds a twelfth of the yearly service charge, estate charge and ground rent its builder states, on the card, the home’s page, the affordability tool and in the chat alike, and says so (“incl. charges”). A charge the builder has not published is never taken as nothing: the page names it and says to ask the sales office. A freehold has no ground rent.

The monthly figure beside a price now uses the Bank of England’s average quoted rate for a 2-year fix at 90% loan to value, a 10% deposit’s own, read monthly through HomePortfolio, where it had used the middle of every fixed series (September 2026: 5.37% where it had said 5.27%). Every monthly figure names the month its rate describes.

Pay is the council’s median for employees living there (ONS ASHE), said as such: it had been called household income and set against the council’s as if it were the neighbourhood’s. Flood risk reads where most addresses around a home are, naming the few in a worse band, where it had taken the worst. Broadband speeds below ultrafast are called older homes’ nearby, beside what Part R requires of new homes. Economic activity is withheld while HomePortfolio rebuilds its source.

Each school’s Ofsted outcome is the one that speaks for it now: a report card’s area grades, or a 2024-25 inspection’s grades by area, never an older headline grade it superseded, and never an overall grade made up from areas. A school counts as good or better only with no area below the expected standard.

An “up to” offer counts for nothing in any ranking or sum, only the most it could be. A development’s offer is weighed by how many of its homes carry it, and says so. Stamp duty paid is worth at most the stamp duty due on the price. The cash tool now takes off the builder’s stated cash offers it had promised to, by the same rule as the chat.

A tool opened from a home now works out that home, the builder’s own homes included, where most had opened a typical home instead; a home the tools cannot cost says why.

Noise now says what its figures are: road the typical home’s daytime level and rail the loudest, each against its own WHO guideline, where it had said “average”. The new-build premium tool now names the index it uses, HomePortfolio’s repeat-sales index, where it had named the UK House Price Index.

This page published: how every figure on NewHomeSearch is made, from its sources to its limits, with the worked examples run through the same engines the tools use.

Location and neighbourhood read from HomePortfolio’s area views: the census, street crime, walk, transit and bike scores, broadband and mobile, flood, ground, air and noise risks, and planning nearby, each against its local authority.

Developments from the builders’ own websites joined the catalogue, matched to the portal’s developments by builder, distance and name, and the catalogue now rebuilds when a builder-site load lands as well as on a portal refresh.

Four and a half times income read as the Bank of England’s high loan-to-income threshold rather than a cap, the loan-to-value ceiling set from the government’s mortgage guarantee scheme, and the affordability, cash, stamp duty and premium tools published.

Stamp duty bands, conveyancing, survey and mortgage fee allowances, lending rules and every scheme rule read at their primary sources and recorded with their dates and quotations.