Land by postcode · RM area · RM4
What the open records say about the RM4 postcode district in Essex: recent sales, planning designations and controls, and the council that decides applications. District-level facts to read before you sell or develop a plot in Romford.
Residential sales recorded by HM Land Registry between 2024-08 and 2026-07. This is market context for the district, not a land valuation: what a plot is worth depends on what can be built on it, which these figures do not show.
Sales in 24 months
104
Median sale price
£612,500
Median £ per m² of floor area
£6,339
Median, last 12m vs prior 12m
-8.6%
£645,500 → £590,000
Mix of sales: 43% detached, 34% semi-detached, 19% terraced, 4% flats.
New-build sales 2023–2024: 4 of 103 (4%). A rough proxy for recent building activity: these are homes sold by builders, not development sites.
For each designation on the planning.data.gov.uk register, the share of the 160 live postcodes in RM4 whose centroid falls inside it. This measures postcodes, not land area, and says nothing about any individual plot.
115 of 160 postcodes
Epping Forest · Havering · Brentwood
18 of 160 postcodes
Havering-atte-Bower · Abridge
No postcodes in RM4 fall inside: National Landscape (AONB), National Park, Article 4 Direction area.
Flood zones, tree preservation orders, local plan allocations, settlement boundaries and non-designated heritage are not included here and are checked in a full assessment.
72% of postcodes in RM4 are inside the Green Belt. National policy treats most new building in the Green Belt as inappropriate unless it falls within a defined set of exceptions, so for a plot here the first fact to establish is which side of the Green Belt boundary it sits on.
These are district-level facts. The free assessment checks your actual boundary against the same registers and the local plan and tells you plainly what they mean for your plot.
Decided planning applications in RM4 since 2021, from the council registers, grouped by the kind of scheme a landowner might be weighing up. Extensions, conditions and tree works are left out. Counts, not estimates.
By the kind of plot, from the wording of each proposal:
5 decided since 2021, 3 refused, typically 357 days to a decision
0 of 5
approved, 0%
43% across London
3 decided since 2021, 2 refused, typically 225 days to a decision
0 of 3
approved
45% across London
7 decided since 2021, 4 refused, typically 106 days to a decision
0 of 7
approved, 0%
0% across London
Decided planning applications (not extensions, conditions or tree works) in this postcode district from the councils' own registers, classified by the wording of each proposal. Counts, not estimates; where a class has fewer than three applications it is not shown.
RM4 is split between planning authorities: Epping Forest (74% of sampled postcodes), Havering (18% of sampled postcodes). The remaining 8% of postcodes fall under authorities not resolved for this page.
Draw your boundary, tell us what you own, and an architect checks it against these registers and the local plan. Free, no obligation, and you get a straight written answer.
It depends on where the plot sits, not on the district average. In RM4, 72% of postcodes are in the Green Belt, 11% in a conservation area. On Green Belt or National Landscape plots a new home is the exception and needs a specific case; a replacement dwelling, a conversion or a modest extension is usually the realistic route there. Outside those designations the questions that decide it are whether the plot is inside or adjoining the settlement boundary in the local plan, whether it has its own road access, and what is next to it. A plot on the edge of a village or town with access has the best chance; an open field outside the settlement boundary rarely gets consent for housing whatever the market is doing.
No Article 4 direction is recorded for RM4, so houses keep their normal permitted development rights for outbuildings and extensions within the size limits. Those rights do not extend to agricultural land, paddocks or a change of use to residential, which normally need permission or prior approval.
Developers look at three things before they talk about price: whether the plot is outside the Green Belt and any National Landscape, whether it sits inside or beside the settlement boundary, and what finished homes sell for. In RM4 the median sale is £612,500, and only 4% of 2023–2024 sales were new-build homes, so builders have been quiet here. A single plot usually goes to a local builder or a self-builder; a site for five or more homes attracts regional housebuilders, normally through an option or a conditional contract rather than an outright purchase, so the price you see quoted is not the price you receive.
There is no district figure for land, because a plot's value comes from what can be built on it, not from where it is. As a guide, a serviced plot with consent for one house commonly sells for around a third of the finished house value, which in RM4 would be measured against a £612,500 median sale. The same plot without consent, or inside the Green Belt, is worth a small fraction of that, and a paddock with no realistic route to consent is worth agricultural or amenity value only. The free check tells you which of those your plot is before you talk to anyone about a price.
Three places: the local plan and its policies map for the settlement boundary and allocations, the council's planning register for what has been approved or refused on neighbouring land, and planning.data.gov.uk for the national designations. That is an evening's work if you know what you are looking for. The alternative is to draw your boundary on this site: an architect checks it against the same records and writes back within 48 hours with a plain answer, free and without obligation.
Computed from open-data records; district-level, not plot-level measurements. Sales: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data (2024-08-01 to 2026-07-31), © Crown copyright, Open Government Licence. Designations: planning.data.gov.uk (OGL), retrieved 2026-09-05; conservation areas and Article 4 directions are made locally and published on that national register. Postcode centroids: OS Code-Point Open 2026.3.0, contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Place name is the most common post town in the sales records. Figures computed 2026-09-06.