Why We Built Viven

Viven started with a spreadsheet. A genuinely embarrassing spreadsheet with fourteen tabs, colour-coded by data source, that I built over the course of six weeks while trying to buy a home in South London. If that sounds excessive, wait until you hear about my brother’s experience renting his first place. Between us, we managed to have two completely different property nightmares that led to the same conclusion: this should not be this hard.

The buying nightmare

I found the place on Rightmove on a Tuesday evening. Nice photos, decent floor plan, close to a station. I liked it. My partner liked it. We booked a viewing for Saturday.

Then I made the mistake of trying to actually research it.

Flood risk first. Went to the Environment Agency’s website. Entered the postcode. Got told the risk from rivers and sea was “very low” but surface water was “low to medium”. What does that mean in practical terms? The site didn’t say. Opened a second EA tool to look at the flood map layer. Different interface, different colour scheme, different level of detail. Found a third tool for reservoir flooding. That was another website entirely. Three tools, one government body, one type of risk.

Then crime. Police UK publishes street-level data, which is great, except you can only search one month at a time. I wanted a year of trends. So I sat there clicking through twelve separate months, copying numbers into my spreadsheet like some kind of feral data analyst. It was a Wednesday night. I was drinking a flat white at 9pm. My partner asked if I was okay. I was not okay.

EPC data was on another website. The council’s planning portal looked like it had been built during the Blair administration and hadn’t been touched since. School catchment data was on the Get Information About Schools service, but Ofsted ratings were on Ofsted’s own website, and the two didn’t link to each other. Broadband speeds were on Ofcom’s checker. Geological risk was on the BGS viewer, which loaded so slowly I genuinely thought my laptop had frozen.

I did this for every property we seriously considered. By the time we exchanged contracts, seven months later, I estimated I’d spent over 40 hours on research alone. Forty hours of evenings and weekends, on top of a full-time job, just trying to understand what I was buying. And I say this as someone who works in tech and is comfortable pulling data from APIs and reading government datasets. Most buyers don’t have that background. Most buyers just trust the estate agent and hope for the best.

My brother’s rental nightmare

My brother’s experience was different but equally maddening. He was renting his first place — a one-bed flat in Zone 3 — and the letting agent rushed him through the whole thing. “Lots of interest.” “Won’t be available by Friday.” The usual script. He viewed it once, for about fifteen minutes, signed the tenancy agreement the same week, and moved in a fortnight later.

Within the first month he discovered that the flat had an EPC rating of E, which meant the heating bill was astronomical. The council tax was Band D — higher than he’d budgeted for. The “quiet residential street” turned into a rat run during rush hour because drivers used it to skip the A205. And the broadband maxed out at 15 Mbps, which made working from home a daily exercise in patience and rage.

None of this was hidden. It was all public data. The EPC was on the register. The council tax band was on the council’s website. The traffic patterns were visible on Google Maps at 5pm on a weekday. But nobody told him to check, the letting agent certainly wasn’t going to volunteer it, and when you’re being pressured to sign quickly you don’t think to spend a weekend cross-referencing government databases.

He was locked into twelve months. He stuck it out, but he spent the whole time resenting the flat and the £200 a month in heating he hadn’t planned for.

The gap that shouldn’t exist

The thing that kept nagging at both of us was this: you can check a used car’s full history for about £15. One report. Mileage, finance, write-offs, stolen status — all in one place. Takes about thirty seconds. But when you’re spending hundreds of thousands on a home, or £1,400 a month on rent? There’s no equivalent. Nothing. The data exists, it’s public, it’s already been collected by various government bodies. It’s just scattered across fifteen different websites that were all built independently over the last twenty years, by different departments, with no coordination whatsoever.

That felt like a problem worth solving.

What we built

Viven pulls data from over 15 official UK sources — Land Registry, Environment Agency, Police UK, EPC register, Ofcom, Ofsted, TfL, BGS, DEFRA, and more — and stitches it together into a single report for any residential address in England and Wales. Price history and comparable sales. Flood, subsidence, and radon risk. Crime statistics and trends. School ratings and distances. Transport links and commute times. Broadband speeds. Air quality. Planning applications nearby. Energy performance.

Everything that took me 40 hours to research manually, generated in under 30 seconds.For £14.99 for buyers and £9.99 for renters. We’re not replacing solicitors or surveyors — you absolutely still need those (here’s how a property report differs from a RICS survey). But we’re giving you the information to decide whether a property is worth getting to that stage. Because most people don’t discover the red flags until they’ve already spent £2,000 on legal fees and the sunk cost fallacy has well and truly kicked in.

No agenda, no commission

We don’t work for the seller. We don’t work for the landlord. We don’t earn commission on the sale price or take referral fees from mortgage brokers. We pull together public data, present it in plain English, and let you make your own decision.

If we’d had this when we were searching — me buying, James renting — we’d have saved weeks of stress, avoided some genuinely bad decisions, and spent a lot fewer Wednesday nights hunched over a spreadsheet at 9pm. That’s what we want for you.