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Compare markets

Put up to four markets on the same ruler. The shapes do most of the explaining.

Market 1 Market 2 Market 3 Market 4

Commercial property 66 Extreme Priced on leases and yields, repriced by interest rates — slow, leveraged and specialist.
Residential property 59 Tough The shape most British households own without ever seeing it: heavily leveraged, slow to exit and expensive to hold.

	Commercial property	Residential property
Exit difficulty	5	5
Volatility	3	2
Leverage	4	4
Carry cost	4	4
Fraud risk	2	2
Protection gap	3	3
Barrier to entry	4	4
Expertise needed	4	3
Difficulty	66 Extreme	59 Tough
In a sentence	Offices, warehouses, shops and industrial units, valued on the rent they produce and repriced hard by the structural shifts in how we work and shop.	The asset most British households hold most of their wealth in, bought with borrowed money, sold over months, and priced by a process that can collapse at any point before exchange.
Unit	One building or unit	One dwelling
Smallest realistic trade	Institutional lot sizes; retail via funds	One property, or a share through fractional and REIT structures
Settlement	Weeks to months, with substantial due diligence	Exchange of contracts then completion, typically 8–20 weeks

The fingerprint measures how demanding a market is to take part in. It is not a rating or a recommendation.