GO ON, admit it, if you've got internet access, you've had a peep. It would be only natural.

We all want to know what our bricks and mortar are worth or, more accurately, what somone might be willing to pay for them. It's against human nature not to stop to look when we see a house just like ours in an estate agent's window. After all, we might want to move, or have to move and need to down- - or even up- - size and some idea of what the old hearth and home would make if we had to put up the "for sale" board is useful.

At www.nethouseprices.com we can do just that, and we have been doing in our tens of thousands and more. It lists the price of every house sold in the last two years. Know the address and/or the postcode? Key it in and, for nothing, it will tell you exactly what that house up the road went for.

I've done it, I admit it, though hell is more likely to freeze over before we move (I looked in the loft last week and thought fleetingly of arson rather than relocation). The web site told me that the house like ours which was sold last year actually went for the price local gossip put on it. Balancing their conservatory against our off-street car port and outbuildings, it gave us a basis for a good guess and that was a relief, for a reason nothing to do with selling or moving in our own lifetime.

Until Wednesday, when the Chancellor moved off the £263,000 base line of recent years, fiscal creep put the threat of inheritance tax (ne death duties) over the heads of some of the not-very-well-off as the price of ordinary semis crept up. Now the threat has receded. We've been in our house long enough to see the price rise to more than 40 times what we paid.

Looking at house prices may also be a bit nosy, and you may get served right for it - I looked up the one seriously posh postcode I know, only to be told nothing was listed. There is, however, an upside to nosiness for potential sellers or buyers.

Sellers can check up on prices in and around the road they want to leave so that they know whether the price it's suggested they ask is realistic. Buyers can check whether, allowing for conservatories or car ports, they are being asked to pay something over the odds. People will still try to drive a hard bargain or gazump a rival for their des res, but at least there can now be an underlying raft of accurate information