Reviewing a property

Open a property and Review sits beside Overview and Journeys. It holds two things, your scorecard for the place and the running notes thread on it. It was called Notes until the scorecard moved in.

On a phone the scorecard lives behind the button above the note box, the one showing the score so far, and slides up when you tap it. On a wider screen it is a column down the right-hand side, so you can read back through the notes without losing sight of what you scored.

You decide what gets asked. Profile, under Viewings, holds your checklist: the things you want to judge every time you stand in a house. It starts with five, and you can rename them, delete them, or add your own.

The same list is asked on every property, which is the point. A question you make up fresh each time cannot be read down a column, and reading down a column is what stops five houses blurring into each other.

Each question is answered one of three ways:

• Rate out of 5. The ordinary one. Word it so five is the good end, because these get averaged: a question called “Noise” scored five has to mean quiet.
• Compare to the photos. Five steps from much smaller to much bigger. A different question from “is it big”, and the one a listing genuinely cannot answer, since a wide lens flatters a small garden and a box room alike and whether a place matched what you expected is only knowable standing in it.
• Yes or no. For anything that is not a matter of degree, like damp or a chain. These never enter the average, deliberately: damp is not a fifth of a score, and letting it move one is how something serious ends up hidden inside a 3.8.

Press Score this viewing, work down your checklist, and save. Tapping a star again clears it, because a question you skipped and a question you scored nothing are different things and the card counts only what you actually answered. That is why it says what a score rests on, as in “from 8”: a score off two questions and one off twelve are not the same claim.

The result is a figure out of 100, shown beside the suitability score and never mixed into it. One of those is worked out from published figures and your finances; the other is what you thought standing in the hall. Averaging them together would make the first less trustworthy without making the second any more so.

Your viewing score also appears on that property’s card on your shortlist, and the list can be sorted by it. Reading down that column is the part that answers “which of these did I actually like”.

Scoring the same property again replaces what you said before. What you think now supersedes what you thought in March.

Scorecards are per person, and that is the most useful thing about them. Two people walk round the same house and disagree, and a single shared score would average exactly that away. With a linked partner the card shows your score, theirs, and the average of the two, with every question underneath in two columns so you can see where you parted company.

Your checklists are separate too. Profile shows theirs under yours, so you can see what they are judging houses on, and anything on their list you do not already ask turns up on your own scorecard for you to answer as well. That way a question only one of you thought of can still be compared.

The first time you score a property, your partner gets a notification with the score. Tidying up a rating afterwards does not send another one.

The rest of the tab is the notes thread, there for anything worth remembering: the thought that arrives on the drive home, the question to put to the agent, the odd thing you spotted in the photos. It sits with the property rather than scattered across texts and a notes app.

With a linked partner, notes on a shared property are visible to both of you and read as a back-and-forth, with each person’s name and photo against what they wrote. Posting one notifies your partner, so they know there is something new without going looking for it.

You can delete your own notes at any time. There is currently no way to edit one after posting, or to delete one your partner wrote.

A note can carry what you scored, so “the bathroom was great, nice tiles” sits next to Bathroom and five stars. Type / in the note box and a list of your answers appears, filtering as you keep typing. The star button beside the box opens the same list if you would rather tap than type.

Your partner’s answers are in there too, under their name, and quoting theirs is often the useful one. “You gave the garden two” is a thing worth writing in a note about the garden, and retyping what they scored is how you end up misquoting them.

A quoted score keeps the value it had when you wrote it. Go back and mark the bathroom down, and the note still shows the five stars it was written against: it is a record of what you said that day rather than a live reading.