You have read the guides. You have the Home Report. You know the advertised figure is not the price. And you still have to write one number on a form by Friday, and you still do not know what it should be.
The gap is in the system rather than in your research: Scotland asks every buyer to name a figure in the dark, and then leaves the only evidence that could inform it scattered across public records nobody reads.
This site exists because the question had no honest answer. We went looking for one and found folklore: percentages quoted with total confidence and no source behind any of them. Then we found that the numbers a buyer actually needs are published, and have been all along. They are simply scattered, unjoined and dated in ways that make them hard work to use. Joining them up is the whole job.
The advice you have already had
Four answers come back every time this question is asked in public. Here is what is wrong with each of them.
- “Offer ten to twenty per cent over.” Over what? The advertised figure, which the seller’s agent chose, or the valuation, which a surveyor produced? Those are two different numbers and they move independently. The published figures show whole areas where homes sold below valuation in the same months that others ran above it.
- “Offer the Home Report valuation.” Sometimes right, often not, and it depends entirely on how many other people viewed it. The valuation is an input to your decision, not the decision.
- “Ask the estate agent what it will take.” The agent is paid by the seller and is paid more when you pay more. They may be perfectly straight with you. They are still not neutral, and you cannot tell the difference from where you are standing.
- “Wait and see if a closing date is called.” A closing date tells you competition exists. It does not tell you what that competition paid on the same street last spring.
What the four have in common is that none of them can be checked, and none of them is about your property.
What actually changed it
What changed it was the published record, and in particular three sources that most buyers never put side by side:
- What comparable homes actually sold for. Every completed sale in Scotland is a public record at Registers of Scotland. Sold prices are facts, not opinions.
- What those same homes were advertised at. This is the half everybody forgets, and it is the half that turns a sold price into a pattern. The gap between advertised and achieved is the number the folklore is trying and failing to describe.
- What the published market reports say about the area and the month. ESPC publishes achieved-against-valuation figures for the east of Scotland, and the pattern moves by area, by property type and by month.
None of that tells you what to offer. What it does is replace a guess with a position you can defend, to your solicitor, to your partner, and to yourself at two in the morning.
Homes in Edinburgh achieved on average 101.5% of Home Report valuation
Median 26 days to sell. Across Edinburgh, the Lothians, Fife and the Borders, 72.8% of homes sold at or above their Home Report valuation and 17.3% went to a closing date.
Bidding on a specific property?
An area average cannot tell you what the flat you viewed on Saturday will go for. That takes its street, its comparables, and how often homes like it go to a closing date.
Get your report — £20 →- Delivered by email within 48 hours.
- Full refund if it is not useful.
What we will not do
We will not tell you what to offer. Not in the report, not on this page, not on the phone. Anyone who does is either guessing or selling something, and in Scotland they are usually being paid by the other side of your transaction.
What we do is narrower and more useful: we research one specific property by hand and hand you the record. Comparable sales near it, what those homes were advertised at against what they achieved, where the Home Report valuation sits, and how often homes like it go to a closing date. Every figure carries its publisher and the date it was read. The decision stays yours, which is the only place it can honestly sit.
If the real question is whether you can afford it
Sometimes “what should I offer” is really “what can I actually fund”. Those are different questions and the second one is arithmetic, so it is free. Your lender lends against the valuation rather than your offer, which means every pound above it is cash on top of your deposit.
The offers over calculator works that out for your own figures, tax included, in about a minute.
What £20 gets you
One property, researched by a person, delivered as a PDF by email within 48 hours. No subscription, no account, and we earn nothing from your purchase of the house. If it is not useful, reply to the email within 14 days and you get your money back, no questions asked.