Behind Property Around London: 10 Government Sources, One Free Guide Per Area

A London property buyer's research workflow tends to look the same. Open Rightmove, scroll listings. Open Ofsted to check school ratings. Open data.police.uk to map crime. Open Transport for London to test commute times. Open the council site to find council tax and parking permit costs. Five tabs, five formats, none of them joined up — and at the end of it, no clear way to compare three neighbourhoods against each other.

Property Around London (PAL) launched at https://propertyaroundlondon.com to close that gap. The platform consolidates structured data from ten authoritative public sources into a single neighbourhood guide per area. Brixton, Croydon, Hackney, Morden, Peckham, Stratford and Walthamstow are live at launch. A further twenty-three guides sit in editorial pipeline, with thirty live by late July 2026 and fifty London neighbourhoods across the wider data pipeline.

**The ten data sources**

Each guide pulls together: HM Land Registry (sold property prices, refreshed monthly), Ofsted via the Department for Education's Get Information About Schools service (school ratings, refreshed daily), the Metropolitan Police via data.police.uk (crime statistics, refreshed monthly), Transport for London (journey times and station data, live API), Ordnance Survey (green space mapping), the Food Standards Agency (food and drink venues), the Office for National Statistics (population and area), the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (energy ratings via the EPC register), the Valuation Office Agency (council tax bands) and the Greater London Authority (cost-of-living inputs).

The same ten sources sit behind every guide. The processing happens once, then the same data flows through to every neighbourhood on the platform. A reader looking at Croydon sees the same data architecture as a reader looking at Hackney — directly comparable, not a different selection of sources per area.

**Every figure dated**

Property Around London publishes the source name and refresh date alongside every figure. Land Registry's last refresh date appears next to property prices. The Ofsted inspection date appears next to every school rating. The Met Police crime data is dated to its rolling twelve-month period. Where a figure cannot be sourced from a named public dataset, the guide says so explicitly rather than fabricating one.

That discipline turns the platform into a defensible reference rather than a marketing surface.

**The PAL Score**

Each guide carries a single composite figure called the PAL Score. It runs from 0 to 100 and blends six base criteria: property value, schools, safety, transport, amenities and green space. The score is calculated from the underlying public data and recalculates whenever a source refreshes — so a school rating change, a price update, or a transport-time refresh moves the score automatically.

Persona-weighted variants of the PAL Score sit alongside the headline number: a first-time buyer weight, a young family weight, a young professional weight, a solo commuter weight, a lifestyle seeker weight and an investment-buyer weight. A reader scanning Croydon as a first-time buyer sees a different sub-score than a reader scanning the same area for buy-to-let — derived from the same data, weighted differently.

**Why independence matters**

Property Around London accepts no estate-agent fees, no developer partnerships and no paid placements. The platform's editorial guardrail is straightforward: the moment a partner is paying for visibility, the data point becomes a sales point. Founder and CEO Elmar Distelhoff describes the approach as independent by necessity.

That position has business-model implications. Long-term, the platform may add affiliate links to mortgage and removals services, plus a premium data layer for relocation and investment use cases. None of those affect the editorial guides — the free neighbourhood pages remain free, fully sourced, and unaffected by commercial relationships.

**What's live now**

Brixton, Croydon, Hackney, Morden, Peckham, Stratford and Walthamstow are the launch slate. Methodology is published in full at https://propertyaroundlondon.com/methodology. The platform's data pipelines run on a published refresh schedule — daily for schools, monthly for property prices and crime, live for transport.

Property Around London is a free service. Updates are released as new guides are completed.

Property Around London
City: London
Address: 124 City Road
Website: https://propertyaroundlondon.com
Email: hello@propertyaroundlondon.com