Is there an HPI check for a house?

The short answer is no: there is no HPI check for a house. The longer answer explains why the car check works, why nothing like it has ever existed for a home, and what a record for a house must get right to be worth more than the paper it replaces.

What an HPI check actually does

A vehicle-history check feels like a consumer product. It is not. It is the retail end of a register built for the institutions that fund, insure and police cars. Finance houses register the loans they secure on vehicles so the next lender knows the car is already pledged. Insurers register write-offs so a total loss cannot re-enter the market as a clean car. Police and the DVLA supply theft, keeper and plate data. Each of those parties has money or a statutory duty riding on the record being right, so the register fills itself.

The register is licensed to the trade - dealers, auction houses, lenders - at pence a look, as a routine step in buying stock. The consumer check is the funnel on top: a few pounds for a one-day answer to four narrow questions. Is there finance outstanding, has it been written off, is it recorded stolen, do the mileage and plates add up. Nothing is positive. It does not tell you the cambelt was changed. It tells you what institutions were obliged to say.

Parties with an interest in registering, one register, sold to the trade.

Hold on to three features of that design. The data comes from parties with an interest in registering it. The product is sold to the professional who carries the risk. And the answer is negative - the absence of a problem, on one day.¹

Why there is no HPI check for a house

A house generates far more history than a car, and more of it matters: extensions, loft conversions, rewires, boilers, replacement windows, a wood-burning stove, a re-roof. Each is regulated. Each produces a certificate. And no institution is obliged to register them in one place.

Instead the evidence sits with eight different bodies, each with its own format and lookup key - and nobody whose job it is to tell the next owner that any of it exists.

The same house, described eight ways, by eight bodies that never talk to each other.

Search for a house history check, a home history check or how to find out what work has been done on a house, and what comes back is raw material rather than an answer: price-paid data from HM Land Registry's open datasets, the EPC register, the planning portal and, where the council publishes it, a building control history that can be searched online. Each is real. None is joined to the others, and none tells a buyer what is missing.

For the car, finance houses register because the next lender is their competitor and their risk; insurers register because a resurrected write-off is their fraud. For a house, the parties who could register have discharged their duty the moment the certificate is issued. The owner is handed a piece of paper and the system forgets. Fifteen years later a buyer's solicitor asks for it.

What a buyer's solicitor actually asks for

The seller's property information form asks the seller to declare works and produce the evidence. For each regulated job the buyer's solicitor expects a specific document from a specific issuer. Not a receipt from the builder. Not a photograph. The certificate.

When a certificate is missing, the transaction does not stop; it slows. The solicitor raises an enquiry. The seller hunts through drawers, phones an installer who may have retired, or asks the scheme or council for a copy. Where nothing can be found, the usual outcomes are a regularisation application to Building Control or an indemnity policy - which pays for the absence of evidence rather than supplying it. All of it happens between offer and exchange, exactly when a chain is most likely to break.

Note what the solicitor is doing. They are not judging whether the extension is well built; a survey does that. They are checking that a document exists, that the right body issued it and that it matches the work declared. That is a verification question, and it is the question a record for a home has to answer.

Why Home Information Packs failed

England and Wales have tried a seller-supplied record once. Home Information Packs made sellers assemble searches, title and an energy certificate up front, so buyers would not have to.

The precise failure is that the pack was commissioned by the party with the least incentive to find a problem and read by a party who carried professional liability for missing one. The solicitor did the only rational thing and ordered everything again. The pack added cost without removing work.

So the test for any home record is not whether the owner likes it, or whether it is on a ledger, or how complete it looks. The test is whether the person who will be sued if it is wrong is willing to rely on it. The vehicle check passes because its data comes from institutions with their own liability. A house record has to pass a different way: by showing, for every document, who issued it and that it has not changed since.

What a house history record would need

Put the car's mechanism and the solicitor's question together and the specification writes itself.

1. 1
   An open-data seed, so it is never emptyTitle and price-paid open data, the EPC, planning decisions, flood zone and the UPRN give every home a day-one record - read from the published datasets, never from the register itself.
2. 2
   Scheme certificates in, by lookup or data agreementCertificates fetched from the issuing body, so the owner is not the courier for institutional paperwork.
3. 3
   Evidence graded by who issued itA Building Control completion certificate is not the owner's photograph of the finished room. The record must say which is which, and weight them.
4. 4
   Documents sealed on uploadEvery file hashed on arrival with an integrity receipt; corrections stored as new versions, so a reader can prove nothing changed.
5. 5
   A form the solicitor acceptsShaped to the forms conveyancers already use, so it drops into a matter rather than sitting beside it.
6. 6
   Portability through saleThe record belongs to the house and moves to the next owner with the history intact; the previous owner's personal details do not.

None of this needs a new institution. It needs one record that normalises what existing institutions already issue, keeps it through sale and lets the buyer's side read it in one place. It is why the roughly 500,000 compliant home logbooks across eight RLBA members (Today's Conveyancer, 6 Oct 2025) are a start, not an answer: a logbook stores documents; it does not grade, seal or score them.

What Property Vault does

Property Vault is building that record, homes first. Every home gets one Vault ID - a permanent identifier in the form PV-GB-{AREA}-{6 digits}, created against a UPRN or a stated reason. Behind it sits the Verified History: a timeline of works - extension, rewire, boiler, roof, electrical - with per-stage evidence requirements, every document hashed on upload and given an integrity receipt, originals kept and corrections stored as new versions.

Over the top sits the Vault Score: a verification score - whether the documents exist, who issued them and that they are unaltered since issue; never a valuation, a credit input or a judgement of the work. It is computed by a rules engine whose method and weights are published: Building Control 1.0, registered professional 0.9, firm 0.7, owner-provided 0.4; owner-only evidence is capped at 65; listed-but-unverified professionals apply ×0.8.² An owner can upload anything, but cannot make a photograph count as a certificate.

Nothing is public. An owner shares a Vault through scoped, time-limited links - owner, agent-buyer, insurer-surveyor and solicitor scopes are live - and scopes hide documents, not history; opens are logged. Agents and conveyancers read the same record in the shape their matter needs; the Sale-Ready Passport built on it is launching in Yorkshire.

The status, plainly: Property Vault runs a Homes pilot at propertyvault.world/homes - a working app with a real verification engine, sealed documents and scoped sharing. One demonstration record is public. Open-data seeding and scheme-certificate ingestion are launching. Integrity anchoring runs as a rehearsal on the XRPL testnet: Merkle roots of keyed commitments are written to the test network, which can be reset, and listed on the public anchor page; mainnet anchoring is on the roadmap, subject to approvals. Property Vault never holds keys, client money or physical goods. It is not an HPI check for a house - it holds no finance, write-off or theft register data - it is the positive record the car check never was, for the asset the car check never covered. The property page sets out the property history report a home Vault holds in full, and the guides list what documents to keep for each kind of work.

Beyond houses

The house is the hardest case, which is why it comes first. But the same question - is there a check for this? - is asked of a classic car, a watch, a painting and a cask of whisky, and the honest answer is the same: negative registers for some classes, and nothing that holds the positive record for any of them. The ambition is the way an HPI check works for a car - for everything you own.¹ The mechanism is a Vault ID, a Verified History graded by who issued it, and a Vault Score, for each.

Watches and jewellery are the next class, then Vehicles, then Marine - each launching with the partners who register it. Every other class is designed for - register interest and say what you own.