What we will and won’t do
Our trust principles
DealScope only works if you trust the numbers you see here. So these seven principles are treated as product constraints, not marketing copy — each one is enforced by how the platform is built, and a feature that breaks one doesn’t ship. They are published here so you can hold us to them.
1. Trust through transparency, not trust marks
We don’t ask you to take the DealScore on faith. It is computed by arithmetic from a listing’s own numeric facts — yield, fixed costs, tenure — and the factor list is rendered next to the number every time it appears.
Add a scoring factor and you must add its row to the breakdown: a score with no visible reasoning is not shippable.
2. Missing data is withheld, not zeroed
A factor we can’t compute — no service charge on file, no tenure recorded — is marked as missing and shown as a dash. It is never folded into a score as a zero, because that would penalise a new listing for a gap that isn’t its fault.
An unknown value is always “—”, never 0, £0, or a blank space that reads as zero.
3. Sponsored placement is always labelled, never disguised as ranking
Paid visibility exists and is disclosed wherever it appears. It is kept structurally separate from the analysis layer — a featured slot in a results list is not the same surface as a score or a deal breakdown, and is never presented as if it were.
One shared component renders every paid placement, deliberately muted rather than gold, so no page can hand-roll a badge that looks like editorial merit.
4. Anonymity is integrity, not evasion
A listing agent’s identity is withheld until you have submitted interest. This keeps a unit judged on its own numbers rather than on which agency’s name is attached — and it is captioned wherever it applies, never left as an unexplained blank.
The two-step enquiry makes the reveal a fair exchange: you share real buying intent, the agent’s details unlock in return.
5. Honesty in errors and disclaimers
Every signed-in page carries a standing risk notice — yields and DealScores are estimates for comparison, not advice — as a persistent line, not a footnote buried in a footer.
Error messages say what actually happened in plain English, never a generic “something went wrong”.
6. Coarse is honest
The DealScore bands its inputs by design — yield thresholds, fee ratios, lease lengths. It will not manufacture single-point precision the underlying data cannot support.
No derived metric gets sub-point precision just because the arithmetic allows it.
7. A stated reason beats a missing button
Every gate in the product — a withheld agent identity, a unit that isn’t yet scored, a control your role can’t use — is rendered as a sentence explaining why, never as a silently absent control or an unexplained dash.
Any new restriction, hidden figure or role-gated control ships with its reason in the interface, or it doesn’t ship.
The trust line
The boundary between what can be paid for and what cannot is enforced structurally, not just promised. Visibility can be bought. The numbers cannot. No agent, no developer, and not DealScope itself can raise a DealScore by payment, sponsorship or subscription tier.
We hold this even where it costs us. Referral fees vary slightly by an agent’s plan, so in principle DealScope earns a different fee depending on which agent wins a same-development comparison. The control is structural: no score, ranking or comparison takes our fee — or the agent’s tier — as an input. Any future feature that would let our economics touch the comparison fails this principle and does not ship.