What Did It Actually Sell For? Sold Price Transparency, Country by Country

Published on: September 1, 2026

Last reviewed: September 2026. General information only. Registry rules, fees and access routes change; verify with the official registry before relying on anything here.

Quick answer:

• England and Wales, Scotland, France and the Netherlands publish real transaction prices. Most of them free.
• Italy is far more open than buyers realise: anyone can request a hypothecary inspection and read the price stated in the deed.
• Spain changed in late October 2025. The notaries' statistical portal publishes real deed prices, anonymised to postal code rather than per property.
• Greece, Turkey, Croatia and much of Latin America publish nothing per property. What exists is a formula-driven assessed value.
• Where a market has an under-declaration history, treat a recorded price as a floor, not a fact.

Every negotiation guide written for buyers says the same thing: look at what similar homes recently sold for on the same street. In England, France and the Netherlands that advice is trivially easy to follow. In Spain, Greece, Turkey and much of Latin America it is close to useless, because the information simply is not published.

This is the gap that trips up cross-border buyers. You arrive with a negotiation method that assumes transparency you no longer have, and you end up anchoring on asking prices, which are the one number in the market that nobody has verified.

This guide sets out where actual sale prices are public, where they can be obtained on request, and where the only thing available is an assessed value that has nothing to do with what was paid.

Why asking prices mislead in the first place

Asking prices are a seller's opening position filtered through an agent's incentives. In slow markets they drift above achievable prices for months. In fast markets they sit deliberately below, to generate competition. Portals compound the problem: the same property is often listed by several agencies at several prices, and delisted properties disappear without recording whether they sold, were withdrawn, or expired.

Sold price data fixes this by recording a completed, notarised, registered transaction. That is why access to it is the single largest determinant of how well an ordinary buyer can negotiate in a given country, and why our guide to how much to negotiate off the asking price reads so differently market by market.

The three tiers of transparency

Tier 1: open sold-price data. The state publishes what was paid, per property or per parcel, free or nearly free, in a form you can search yourself.

Tier 2: obtainable on request. The price exists in a public register and anyone can extract it, but you have to know the procedure, and there is usually a fee per record.

Tier 3: aggregate or assessed values only. No per-property price. What exists is either a statistical average by area, or a tax-assessed value that is set by formula and often diverges sharply from market prices.

Country by country

The pattern is not "northern Europe transparent, southern Europe opaque." France is one of the most transparent markets in the world, and Italy is far more open than most buyers realise. The dividing line is really whether the registry is organised so that a member of the public can search it by property, and whether the state chose to publish the consideration. Our guide to land registry and cadastre systems explains why those structures differ.

Spain: the change most guides have not caught up with

For years the honest answer for Spain was that there was no public source of real transaction prices. Since late October 2025 that is only half true. The General Council of Notaries publishes a statistical portal built directly from notarised deeds, freely accessible, showing average price per square metre, average size and transaction counts, drillable to postal code level and to a search area you draw yourself.

It is not a per-property record and it never will be, since it is anonymised by design. But for negotiation it changes the picture: you can now compare an asking price against what was actually signed in that postcode, rather than against other asking prices on the same portal.

Italy: the route almost nobody uses

Anyone in Italy can request a hypothecary inspection at the Agenzia delle Entrate on a property they do not own. The transcription note that comes back records the transfer and the price stated in the deed. You can search by person or by cadastral identifiers. This is a genuine per-property price lookup, available to a foreign buyer, and it is used far more by professionals than by private buyers.

Two limits matter. The tavolare (Grundbuch) provinces run a different system and are excluded. And the figure you get is the declared price, which is the next problem.

Declared price is not always paid price, and you should not participate

In several markets it has been common practice to declare a lower price in the deed than the amount actually paid, with the difference settled off the books. Buyers are sometimes invited to go along with it on the argument that it reduces transfer tax.

Three reasons not to, all of them practical rather than moral:

1. It is tax fraud in every country where it happens, and the buyer is a party to it.
2. Tax authorities in Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Turkey run valuation checks and can assess transfer tax on a reference or minimum value regardless of what the deed says, then add interest and penalties. Our guide to appealing a cadastral or reference value covers that mechanism.
3. Your future capital gain is calculated from your declared acquisition price. Under-declaring by 100,000 today creates a phantom 100,000 gain when you sell, taxed at the disposal rate, and you cannot retroactively prove the higher figure.

When you read a sold price in a country with an under-declaration history, treat it as a floor rather than a fact, and cross-check against notary or statistical data if it exists.

How to build a real comparable set when there is no sold price data

Where Tier 3 is all you have, negotiation has to be built from other evidence:

• Time on market. Track the specific listing. A property re-listed three times over fourteen months at declining prices tells you a great deal about the seller's position.
• Price history on the listing itself. Several portals retain reduction history. Screenshot it, because it disappears.
• The same property across agencies. In multi-agency markets the same flat frequently appears at different prices. The lowest is the seller's real number.
• Statistical per-square-metre data from the national statistics office, the notaries, the registrars or the central bank. These bodies publish more than most buyers expect.
• Rental yield as a sanity check. If achievable rent implies a yield far below the local norm, the asking price is doing the work, not the fundamentals.
• Ask your own lawyer, not the agent. A local conveyancer who handles thirty transactions a year in that town knows the discount range even where the data is not published.

What to ask before you make an offer

• Is there an official source of transaction prices in this country, and if so what is it called in the local language?
• If prices are only in the registry on request, what is the procedure and can my lawyer run it?
• Is there a tax reference value or minimum taxable value for this property, and how does it compare to the asking price?
• Has this property changed hands before, and at what recorded price?
• If the deed price and the agreed price differ, what am I being asked to sign?

Frequently asked questions

Is sold price data available for free anywhere?
Yes. England and Wales, Scotland and France all publish it free, and Spain's notary portal is free at area level. Elsewhere expect a per-record fee.

Do sold prices include what the buyer paid in fees and taxes?
No. The recorded figure is normally the consideration for the property. Transfer tax, notary fees and agency commission sit on top and can add several per cent.

How current is the data?
Registration lags completion. UK Price Paid Data reflects sales lodged for registration, so recent months are incomplete. France updates twice a year, in April and October. Build that lag into your reading.

Can I look up who owns a property as well as what they paid?
Sometimes. That is a separate question with a different country map, covered in our guide to property ownership privacy and beneficial owner registers.

Does this data exist for new-build sales?
Usually yes once the deed is registered, but off-plan sales register at completion, which can be years after the price was agreed, and developer incentives rarely appear in the recorded figure.

Keep reading on JanusHermes

Before you build a negotiation strategy in a new country, establish which tier you are in. The method that works in England, where you can read the price of every neighbouring sale since 1995, is not available in Athens, and pretending otherwise is how foreign buyers end up anchored to asking prices. JanusHermes lists property from local agencies in 11 languages, with the local agency's own contact details on every listing.

Related reading: How Much to Negotiate Off the Asking Price, The Land Registry Problem, Who Can See That You Own It?, How Long It Takes to Sell a Home by Country, Appealing a Cadastral Value and Source of Funds and Source of Wealth.

Primary sources: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data (landregistry.data.gov.uk); ScotLIS (Registers of Scotland); DVF via data.gouv.fr and economie.gouv.fr; Agenzia delle Entrate, ispezione ipotecaria; Portal Estadístico del Notariado, Spain; INE Portugal; Kadaster, Netherlands.

This guide is general information as of 2026 and does not constitute legal, tax or valuation advice. Registry rules, fees and access routes change; verify with the official registry, and take local advice before relying on any figure in a negotiation.