Nick Draycott, Managing Director of Property Research Services Consultants (PRS Consultants Ltd), pioneered the development of sophisticated property price differential assessments with the creation of HomeMatch in 1991.

Prior to that, this calculation was a combination of guesswork and subjectivity, and because of the lack of objectivity, added greatly to this already traumatic part of the relocation process. Assessing ‘differentials’ combined with agreeing values as part of the ‘guaranteed sales price’ process was (and to some extent still is) the most contentious part of the relocation process because both involve fairly significant amounts of money.

Employees naturally want to maximise their housing allowances and corporates want to be seen to be as fair and objective as possible. HomeMatch was the first methodology to bring a seemingly scientific, objective and transparent approach to this perennial differential assessment problem.

HomeMatch used (and still uses) an off the shelf ‘geodemographic information systems’ (GIS) marketing software package called Mosaic (which is supplied by Experian, more widely known for their credit referencing services). Mosaic’s main function is to analyse and map consumer behavioural characteristics; drawing primarily on sources of ‘people’ data to carry out is neighbourhood comparisons.

Despite the ground breaking success of HomeMatch, Nick decided that, given the objective of a differential assessment was to compare properties, it would be more appropriate to base the analysis on more ‘property’ based data. Property based GIS’ didn’t exist, so with the formation of PRS Consultants in 1993, the suite of Locate property specific GIS’ was created. Initially using just property data from the Census, Locate evolved through Locate2000, Locate3000 and Locate4000, which is the latest in the line.

Apart from being property based, one of the main features of the Locate database was that, because it was created ‘for purpose’ from raw data, it was relatively straightforward to reconfigure that data into any format required, thus enabling the formulation of accurate like for like’ property tables, which subsequently gave rise to the first online differential assessment tool.

Interestingly, the journey from HomeMatch to Locate4000 has, to some extent, come full circle. As stated, HomeMatch is a cosmetic adaptation of Experian’s Mosaic, which is hampered for this purpose by the overwhelming element of ‘people’ data in its neighbourhood classifications. Locate4000 is now a straight adaptation of ACORN (the marketing software package produced by CACI). Its adaption and presentation is much more sophisticated than HomeMatch, and ACORN contains more property data than Mosaic, but in essence they are similar.