How the figures work

Every listing page on this site carries figures we worked out rather than figures an agent published: how far the house is from town, what a mortgage on the asking price would cost, how long the advert has been up, and where the pin on the map really is. This page says what each of them is measured from, and what it is not. Where a figure would be a guess, the site says so rather than guessing.

Distances, the ferry and the broadband figure

Every distance on a listing page is measured as the crow flies between two points on a map, so a road journey is always longer. The distance to Stornoway is given for houses on Lewis and Harris only: for a house on Barra or the Uists the straight line would have a ferry hidden inside it, and a number with a boat in it is not a distance anybody can use.

The nearest ferry is the straight-line distance to the pier, not the time it takes to drive there, which we cannot compute. The route beside it and its crossing time are CalMac's own published timetable. Both change with the season, and sailings are cancelled in weather often enough that a timetable is a plan rather than a promise.

Broadband is Ofcom's coverage figure for the whole postcode, as it stood on the day of the release named on the page — what a premises in that postcode could order, not a speed anybody has measured at that address. Ofcom stopped publishing measured speeds at postcode level in 2024. Where a listing's pin is at postcode precision rather than at its address, the figures are measured from the centre of the postcode rather than from the door.

The block is drawn only where the property's pin is at address or postcode precision. A distance measured from the middle of a whole district and printed beside a house is a false measurement, so a listing we could only place at area precision gets no distances at all rather than hedged ones.

The monthly mortgage figure

Where a listing has a real asking price and is a home rather than a plot or a commercial unit, the page prints one line of arithmetic: what a repayment mortgage on that asking price would cost a month, over 25 years at 5% with a 10% deposit. The rate, the term and the deposit are named on the line itself, every time, because a monthly figure with its assumptions hidden is the mortgage-lead pattern this site does not build.

It is our own arithmetic on a published price and it is not a quote. Nobody has offered you that rate. The figure leaves out fees, insurance, and what it costs to keep an island house standing. What a lender will actually advance on a property out here is their decision and nobody else's, and a croft, a house with no mains water or a property in poor repair can all change that answer. Bare plots and commercial units get no line at all: neither is bought on a residential repayment mortgage.

Map pins

There are three kinds of pin and every caption says which one it is looking at. A solid pin is placed from the address the agent published. A faint pin is the centre of the property's postcode, which out here is usually a township rather than a district, but is still not the property. A hollow pin is the centre of a whole area, and claims nothing beyond which part of the islands the house is in.

Postcode centres come from Ordnance Survey's Code-Point Open, free to use under the Open Government Licence (© Crown copyright and database right; Royal Mail copyright and database right). Map tiles are OpenStreetMap's, and loading one means their server sees your address — see the privacy and cookies page. There are no invented coordinates anywhere on this site: a property whose address places nothing gets the weakest pin the data supports, and says so.

The Street View link, where there is one, opens the road at the pin — which at postcode precision is the postcode's centre rather than the property. It is offered only at address or postcode precision: a link that opens a mile of empty moor is a worse answer than no link. Coverage on the islands is patchy and some townships have none.

Days on the market, and the plus sign

Time on the market is counted from the date the agent's own listing implies. Where a property was already advertised before this site started watching on 30 July 2026, that date is a floor rather than a measurement, and the figure is printed as “83+ days” rather than as a bare number: the advert has been up at least that long.

Some agents publish no listing date at all. For those, the only date there is is the day we first read their page, and printing that as a listing date would be this site inventing a fact. So those listings show no time on the market, and say why.

Prices and price history

Every price on this site is an asking price. Nobody publishes Hebridean sale prices, so this site does not pretend to know them, and what a house was still asking on the day its advert came down is the nearest thing to one there is. Price history runs from 30 July 2026, so a listing with no history is not a listing that has never moved — it is one we have not watched for long enough to say. “Gone” means the advert left the agent's site: sold, withdrawn or let, and we do not know which.

The agent, and what we are not

Every listing names the agent advertising it and links back to them, because they are the authority on it. Where a telephone number is shown it is the number that agent publishes on their own contact page; we are not connected to them and nothing goes through us. This site does not sell property, arrange viewings or take a commission from anybody. Facts lifted from an agent's schedule or description are credited on the listing page, and the property's own words stay theirs — see the about page for the photograph and removal policy.

Every figure described here is printed on the listing page it belongs to, with the same words. If one of them looks wrong, tell us.