Answered plainly,
even the awkward ones.

A Buyer Folio is a commissioned research report on one specific English property, written for the buyer. It runs to ten sections and establishes what identical properties have actually sold for, how much negotiating leverage the listing carries, what liabilities sit on the address in the public record, and a tactical offer bracket — open, aim and walk-away. It costs £400 and is delivered within 48 hours.

Portal estimates are automated valuation models built to capture seller leads, and they will not show you their working. A Buyer Folio names every comparable transaction it used, states the matching rules it applied, and discloses where its evidence was thin. It also refuses to say what a property is worth — it reports only what identical properties have achieved, which is a claim that can be defended in front of an estate agent.

A single self-contained document you can read on a phone, print, or forward to a solicitor or mortgage broker. It includes the Glass Box Anchor, the full named comparables ledger, the Leverage Matrix score, the risk register, the cost-of-ownership picture, the tactical offer bracket, and the email scripts for putting each offer to the selling agent.

We require a strict minimum cohort of 8 identical registered sales to build a defensible tactical bracket. If your property is too unique to meet this threshold, we refuse to publish the folio. You are never asked to pay for research we cannot complete.

No. It is neither. A Buyer Folio is not a RICS Red Book valuation, it is not a mortgage valuation, and it is not a building survey. It cannot assess structural condition, internal layout, decorative state or hidden defects, because it works from registered data rather than a site visit. Commission a qualified RICS surveyor for physical inspection; the Folio is designed to be used alongside one, earlier in the process.

No. SettleIQ is a property data and transaction intelligence platform. It does not provide financial, investment, mortgage or legal advice, and it is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Decisions about what to offer, what to borrow and what to sign remain entirely yours, taken with your own professional advisers.

The Identity Lock is the rule that decides which sales are allowed to inform your number. Properties are matched on type, tenure, age band, floor band and — for houses — plot size. A two-bed leasehold flat is compared only to other two-bed leasehold flats in the same age and floor band. The lock is what stops a three-bed freehold terrace on the same street from contaminating the evidence.

The Glass Box Anchor is the cohort’s median price per square foot applied to your property’s verified floor area. It is called a Glass Box because the working is shown: the cohort is named, the matching dimensions are stated, the time-adjustment is disclosed, and the trim is declared. It is the baseline the entire offer bracket is built around.

The Leverage Matrix is a score from 0 to 10 that describes how firm the seller’s position actually is. It is built from four observable signals: market velocity in the local segment, price momentum, listing traction, and the reduction history of the listing itself. A high score means a firm seller — move deliberately, open close to the Aim, and argue on evidence rather than price. A low score means a soft position, which justifies opening further below the Aim.

Fourteen authoritative England public datasets: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, the EPC Register, the ONS UK House Price Index, the VOA Council Tax list, the ONS National Statistics Postcode Lookup, the Environment Agency NaFRA flood assessment, BGS and UKHSA radon classifications, MHCLG planning data covering conservation areas and Article 4 directions, the National Heritage List for England, the Indices of Multiple Deprivation, GIAS and Ofsted school records, DfT NaPTAN transport nodes, Ofcom Connected Nations broadband data, and OpenStreetMap. Every figure in a Folio names the dataset it came from.

Not when you submit the request. You send us the address and your details, we confirm by email, and we build the folio. Only once it is finished and ready to send do we email you a payment link for £400. Pay that, and the finished folio arrives in your inbox the same day, as a single HTML file. If the evidence turns out to be too thin to produce a defensible bracket, we tell you at that stage and no payment link is ever sent.

Forty-eight hours from confirmed order in the ordinary case. If the address has an unusual title, a missing EPC, or a cohort that requires manual adjudication, you will be told before the deadline rather than after it.

Yes, and it is often the better order of operations. A Folio commissioned before the viewing tells you which questions to ask on the day and what the listing is not saying. All that is required is the address and the asking price.

The Folio is yours regardless of outcome. Its purpose is to make sure that whatever you decide, you decided it against registered evidence rather than against a listing price. Buyers who walk away on the strength of a Folio frequently describe it as the most valuable £400 they spent.