The questions buyers ask us, answered.

A 360° property report on a single UK flat. We pull together the lease, the cladding status, the freeholder, flood and environmental risk, planning history, EPC and price history - then translate it into plain English with a clear verdict you can act on.

No. A BackStory report is an information tool, not legal or financial advice. It does not replace your conveyancer's searches or a RICS survey. It runs in parallel - surfacing the issues you'd want your solicitor to dig into, and the ones you'd want to walk away from before paying for searches.

Partly - but the timing is wrong. Your solicitor only gets going after your offer has been accepted, once you are already paying survey and legal fees and already attached to the place. BackStory runs before any of that, so walking away still costs you nothing, and what you find is leverage if you'd rather renegotiate. Conveyancing is also thorough on the legal mechanics and largely reactive: it answers the questions it is asked, and depends on what the seller discloses or what a standard search happens to catch. It is not set up to go digging through planning portals, cladding registers, managing-agent ratings and freeholder history to tell you whether you should buy at all. One of our own flats is the proof: planning permission for an extra floor on the building had already been approved and was sitting in the local planning portal the whole time, and nobody flagged it during the sale.

That is exactly when it is worth most. Buyers - first-time buyers especially - fall for a place and then quietly talk themselves out of anything that complicates the story. A BackStory report is deliberately unemotional: an outside read on the pros and cons, so you can separate "I love this kitchen" from "is this building actually a good idea".

Anyone buying a flat in the UK who wants a second opinion before they exchange. We are especially useful for first-time buyers and anyone buying leasehold, where the risks are hidden in documents most buyers never see until it's too late.

Right now we focus on flats, because that is where the lease, cladding and freeholder traps live. Houses are on the roadmap.

Ten risk dimensions, scored on a consistent scale: lease and ground rent, cladding and fire safety, freeholder and managing agent, flood and environmental risk, planning history, structural and building condition, EPC and running costs, transaction history, neighbourhood texture, and resale outlook.

HM Land Registry, the Title Register, EPC Open Data, the Building Safety Register, Environment Agency, local-authority planning portals, ONS Census, OpenStreetMap and our own pattern library - built from hundreds of conversations with buyers who got stung after exchange.

We work from the same public records your solicitor would consult, and a human expert signs off every report before it goes out. We will tell you where the data is thin or where the AI is uncertain - we'd rather flag a grey area than pretend it's black and white.

Tell us. Every report has a feedback link. If we got something wrong or missed a record, we will rerun and reissue it.

We use your email to deliver the report and follow up if we have questions. We do not sell it. See our privacy policy for the full picture.

No. We only consult public records and our own sources. Nobody on the seller's side is notified.

Yes - with your solicitor, mortgage broker, partner, family, anyone helping you decide. The report is yours.