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A postcode names a group of addresses; a UPRN names one. If you are joining sales, energy certificates, council tax bands and listings, the choice.
Most property spreadsheets are keyed on the postcode because the postcode is what people know. It works until it does not: two datasets disagree on how to write "Flat 2, 12 Lordship Lane", a block of forty flats shares one postcode with a shop, a new development gets a postcode months after its first sale. The fix is not a better postcode. It is a different key.
A postcode is a delivery unit. It groups the addresses a postal worker walks between, typically a street or part of one, often a dozen or more homes, sometimes a single large building. It was never meant to identify a property, and it does not: the same postcode covers the ground-floor shop and the flats above it. For area statistics it is fine and useful; the postcode district, the "SE23" part, is the grain MarketCode publishes its indices and volumes at. For a property it is a lookup key with dozens of collisions.
The Unique Property Reference Number is a twelve-digit identifier assigned by the local authority when an address is created, and published through Ordnance Survey AddressBase. Every addressable location in Great Britain has one: each flat in a block, each house, the shop, the substation. It never changes when the address is rewritten, and it is what the public datasets increasingly carry. The glossary entry has the short definition; this is the argument for using it.
Take one flat and five things you want to know about it: its registered sales, its energy certificate, its council tax band, whether it is listed for sale, and who owns the title. Five datasets, five ways of writing the address. Join them on text and you match some, miss some and, worse, match a few wrongly. Join them on the UPRN and the question becomes whether each dataset has been resolved to the UPRN, which is a yes-or-no you can measure.
MarketCode does that resolution once, upstream, and keeps the answer. A property summary is one call because everything behind it was already joined at the front door. Where a record could not be placed on a UPRN with confidence, it is reported as not found rather than guessed, and the full record carries a source and a confidence score beside every field.
Flats in subdivided buildings. Some datasets record the building rather than the unit: an older energy certificate, a listing that gives the building address. A per-unit count over those over-reports, and a building-level record attached to one flat can be wrong for its neighbour. The floor area is the field most often affected, which matters because it is what turns a price into a price per square metre.
And coverage: AddressBase is Great Britain, so a Northern Ireland address has no UPRN here. HM Land Registry, by contrast, is England and Wales, so a Scottish address resolves to a UPRN and then has no sale history to attach.
The autocomplete is free: type part of an address or a postcode and get ranked candidates. Pick one and resolve it to the canonical record and its UPRN, which costs 8 credits because it returns a licensed Ordnance Survey record. Then carry the UPRN through everything else. The pattern is autocomplete on every keystroke, resolve once, and the MarketCode skills tell an assistant to do exactly that. Every address at a postcode, with UPRNs, is the postcode lookup, at 10 credits.
Area questions. The house price index, the monthly sale counts and the asking-price index are all published by postcode district, and the market pages for a district, such as SE23 in Lewisham, are built on it. Property questions want the UPRN. Most real work needs both, in that order: resolve the property, then read its area.
With MarketCode connected, ask your assistant: "Resolve 12 Lordship Lane, SE22 8HN to its UPRN, then give me its sale history and energy certificate." Watch it autocomplete, resolve once and reuse the identifier. That is the whole idea, and it costs eight credits.
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