The questions buyers ask, answered in plain English.

BeforeIBuy exists for the moment between “I think we might move there” and “we’ve signed something”. Ask better questions during that fortnight, and you make better decisions.

What we do

You give us a place: a town, city or district. We give you honest, plain-English answers to the questions people ask before they move. Is it a good place to live, what do houses cost, what are the schools like, does it flood, is it safe, how well connected is it, can you extend a home there, what is the area around like, and who lives there.

Every answer is on its own page, so you can link to it, share it, or come straight in from a search.

What we do not do

We do not sell houses. We do not list properties. We do not write copy for landlords.

Where the data comes from

Public and open data only: HM Land Registry for prices, police.uk for crime, Ofsted and the Department for Education for schools, the Environment Agency for flooding, Ofcom for broadband and mobile, each local council for planning, the Office for National Statistics for demographics, and 15 more public sources. Each answer lists its main sources and a data date, and where our data comes from names the publisher behind each section and the licences that apply.

An AI model, Anthropic's Claude, writes each answer from those figures, and automated checks confirm every number in it matches the data before it is published. How it works explains the checks.

The company behind it

beforeibuy.co.uk is operated by 6 Canvas Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 14720423), whose registered office is Flat 6 Thurlow Mansions, 29 Clarence Parade, Southsea PO5 2ET. You can reach us any time at hello@beforeibuy.co.uk.

Who we are

A small team of people who have moved house more times than is sensible and made most of the avoidable mistakes. We started this so the next person would not have to.

BeforeIBuy is run by Rory Sheen, who founded it in 2026. He has spent 40 years working with data and 35 years buying and selling property. He decides what the site covers and how the answers are written and checked, and he reads every correction that comes in.

If something here is wrong, our corrections page says how to tell us, and it reaches him directly.