Explorer's primary use is filtering properties for a letter campaign, but it can also be used for valuation prep.
While a Homesearch Market Report will offer up local comparables, sometimes its nice to also see where on a map these local sales are in relation to your next market appraisal.
Once you're within Explorer, start by adding the full address of the property you're due to value in the top left "Search in Explorer" bar and select the address from the drop down provided;
Once you have the property in question selected in the top left of the screen, continue to apply filters as you search for similar properties. For example, 52 Garfield Street in Watford is a 3 bed Terrace house, therefore the filters I'm applying in Explorer will be: 3 Bed and Terraced to start off with but you might also consider adding Internal Area, Plot Size etc,
I'm also going to scroll down the filter list and look out for Sold Date, and select By Range. In this section we can apply the dates we're interested in, to see if properties of a similar nature had sold in that time frame.
In this example I'm starting with the last 12 months. Once you have added in your date range, the search button at the bottom of the screen will display "No Results Found". This is because we're currently only checking to see if 52 Garfield Street matches all of these criteria's.
We'll need to scroll all the way to the top now and apply a radius search.
The reason we've selected the filters in this order is because as we select the varying eighth or quarter mile radius, the number of matching properties will update on the search button towards the bottom of the page. In effect you can check to see if you need to expand on your filtering before executing the search each and every time.
Once you have searched these filters, you'll have a top down view of the local sales similar to the property you're due to value. Each pin can then be clicked on to provide either a simple overview or expanded into a detailed "home search".
As you can see above, there are 18 other 3 bed terraced houses that have sold in the last 12 months, all within a quarter mile of 52 Garfield Street.