How to compare houses fairly: a weighted scoring framework
By the time you have seen six houses, your brain has already picked one — usually for reasons it cannot articulate. The job of a comparison framework is not to override your gut, it is to check it. If your scoring system and your gut agree, buy the house. If they disagree, find out why.
Step 1: choose your criteria
Pick five to eight things that genuinely matter to you. The classic ones are: location, kitchen, garden, layout, parking, condition, value, light. Avoid criteria you cannot easily score (“character” is hard; “south-facing garden” is easy).
Step 2: weight them
Distribute 100 points across your criteria. If location is the most important, give it 30. If parking is a nice-to-have, give it 5. The numbers force you to be honest about your real priorities. A common shape:
Location 25 · Kitchen 15 · Layout 15 · Garden 10 · Condition 10 · Value 10 · Light 10 · Parking 5
Step 3: score each property out of 10
For every viewing, give each criterion a score from 1 to 10. Do this at the property, before bias and memory creep in. Be ruthless: a 7 means very good. A 9 should be rare. A 10 should be almost never.
Step 4: calculate the weighted total
Multiply each score by its weight and add them up. A house that scores 7 on location (25 weight) gets 175 points for location. The maximum possible score is 1000.
Step 5: rank — but do not blindly obey
The ranking will surprise you. Houses you thought you loved often slip down. Houses you wrote off sometimes rise. The point is not to follow the list — it is to understand why your gut disagreed. If a house with a worse score still feels right, identify which criterion is wrong (or which criterion is missing).
Common scoring mistakes
- Score creep: the third house always gets higher numbers than the first because you are calibrating. Re-score the first one after the third visit.
- Photogenic bias: the house that took better photos in the listing always feels better in memory. Use your own photos and notes, not the agent’s.
- Refurb dreaming: never score what the house could be after £30,000 of work. Score what you would buy today.
- Single-criteria override: “but the garden!” If one criterion is dragging your decision, increase its weight openly rather than letting it secretly dominate.
The two-minute rule
Score every property within two minutes of leaving the driveway. Within an hour the scores are guesswork. Within a day they are fiction. SeenHouse is built around this — we ask you to score before you forget, then we maintain the weighted shortlist for you. Try it free.