Who publishes property transaction data, country by country

Few countries publish what homes actually sold for. Many publish asking prices, several publish an index, and a handful publish the transactions themselves. This is a directory of the third kind: registers of achieved prices that anyone can download. It is short because it only lists registers this network has read and used, and a directory padded with entries nobody checked would be worse than no directory.

How do the registers compare at a glance?

Five registers and one contrasting case, set side by side on the properties that decide what anyone can build on them: whether price and size arrive on one record, how often the register updates, and what the licence attaches. These are the register’s own characteristics; the figures each one produces stay on its own market site.

What does England and Wales publish?

HM Land Registry Price Paid Data. Every transfer of a registered title since 1995: price, date, address, property type, tenure, new-build flag. No floor area, so a rate needs a second dataset. Updated monthly. Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial reuse with attribution, and that permissiveness is why the market has a dozen independent analysts.

Energy Performance of Buildings Register. The floor areas, matched by address. Free bulk download, with Royal Mail copyright on the address data.

What does Singapore publish?

HDB Resale Flat Prices, on Data.gov.sg. Every public-housing resale since 1990, with price, flat type, storey range, floor area, lease commencement and remaining lease on one row. Updated within days. Singapore Open Data Licence v1.0.

URA Data Service. Private sale caveats and lease contracts, by API with a registered key, on a rolling five-year window. Its terms permit derived statistics and are stricter about redistributing the records themselves, so publishers of Singapore private data typically publish aggregates only.

What does France publish?

Demandes de valeurs foncières. Recorded transfers with price and built surface on one row, geolocated, published by the tax administration twice a year under Licence Ouverte 2.0. Excludes Alsace-Moselle and Mayotte, which sit under a different land-registration regime.

The reuse conditions are the thing to read before building anything: they forbid indirect re-identification and forbid letting the underlying data be indexed by search engines. Derived statistics are fine; exposing the rows to a crawler is not.

Why is Italy the contrasting case?

Osservatorio del Mercato Immobiliare. Italy publishes assessed price ranges by zone and property condition, twice a year, rather than a register of transactions. It is useful and it is a different object: an assessment of what property in a zone is worth, not a record of what any particular property sold for. A directory like this exists partly to make that distinction visible, because a table combining the two would be comparing a valuation with an achieved price.

Why are asking-price feeds not listed?

Because an asking price is a hope and this is a directory of outcomes. Portals publish asking prices in volume in every country, and they are current in a way no register of completed sales can be, but they measure the seller’s opening position rather than the market’s answer. The two move differently, and a directory that mixed them would be longer and worth less. The distinction between the three kinds of price a reader meets has its own piece on this site, linked above.

What should you check before building on a register?

• Does it carry an area? If not, every rate needs a join, and the join has a match rate you must publish.
• What is the update cycle? It sets a floor on how current anything you publish can be.
• What is the licence, and are there extra conditions? The base licence is often permissive and the sector-specific conditions are where the constraints live.
• What is excluded? Every register excludes something: a region, a transaction type, a tenure. Find out before you claim national coverage.
• Is there a disclosure rule? Some registers require a minimum sample before a local figure may be published, and treating that as optional is a licence problem rather than a style one.

How does the checklist work on a real register?

Run the French register through it. Does it carry an area? Yes, so there is no join and no match rate to publish. The update cycle? Twice a year, so nothing built on it can be more current than the last release. The licence? Permissive at base, with two sector conditions that forbid indirect re-identification and forbid letting the data be indexed by search engines. What is excluded? Three eastern départements and Mayotte, under a different registration regime. Is there a disclosure rule? In effect yes, because the re-identification condition puts a floor under how thin a published local figure may be. Five questions, five answers, and the shape of everything you may build is known before a line of code is written.

Corrections and additions are welcome. This list will grow as this network reads more registers, and only then. Three of the registers above are already published as products: England and Wales, Singapore and France.