Diving into England & Wales house prices

Making use of an incredible open dataset to look at local house prices

Understanding local house prices

I’ll lead with a visualisation of the national findings for England and Wales. This hexagon map shows the stock-weighted average house price of every House of Commons constituency in 2024 Q2.

What is new about this

Everyone cares about house prices, so I’m adding some new local data to the discussion. There is plenty to discuss about what is causing house supply constraints and price inflation, but for now I’m just going to show you results of a new-ish method applied to two locally-relevant geographic breakdowns.

House of Commons constituencies, and census travel to work areas are shown here but the method could be used for any defined area with enough housing sales. Travel to work areas “approximate self-contained local labour market areas, where the majority of an area’s resident workforce work, and where the majority of the workforce live”. This provides a clearer link between the house prices of the area and other economic and social statistics. Constituencies are a useful frame of reference because they have approximately the same population and connect housing price to political choices.

How does this work

I will do a more detailed methodology post soon, but here is the brief outline.

Basic methods of analysing house prices like medians and means (averages) don’t give us a great sense of what is going on in the house market because in any given monthly period, different types of houses are sold. This skews the average from the underlying dynamics of the market, in what is called composition effect.

Prevailing methods in the UK use a model where all the attributes of the property that contribute to its value are analysed to determine what is driving the underlying price changes: how does the house’s square footage, or the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, or the size of its plot, or the type of property, or its proximity to various amenities, determine its price. The timeliest methods are published by Nationwide and Halifax, which focus on regional and national prices, while the most detailed are published by HM Land Registry, at the local government district level.

This method instead relies on the fact with a sufficiently large amount of data, we will have lots of repeated sales of the same property. We can use an algorithm to get a good signal of the underlying price movements in the market by assuming, on average, a fixed effect of sales of the same properties. In England and Wales, an open dataset of 28 million market sales of housing is published by HM Land Registry, of which 20.5 million (73%) are repeated sales.

If you’ve read enough and want to dive into the data, constituencies are explored in this interactive dashboard and travel to work areas in this one.

Results for constituencies

The top five constituencies with the largest growth, and highest prices, are all in London. For price growth, Walthamstow has the largest increase with 165% in the fifteen years from 2009 Q2 to 2014 Q2, while Kensington & Bayswater has the highest prices for a typical property at £1,160,200.

While the substantial growth of the London property market is well known, we can also use this data to look into those areas that have stagnant property markets. There is a stark comparison between Liverpool Riverside, one of the most disadvantaged House of Commons constituencies, with Wimbledon, one of the most privileged.

From 2009 Q2 as base year — the low point for UK house prices in the Global Financial Crisis — the price of flats in Liverpool Riverside in 2024 Q2 has increased 15.9%, compared with overall inflation of 54.9%, giving an inflation-adjusted change of -25%. In Wimbledon, the price increase for flats of 88.5% gives an inflation-adjusted change of 21.7%.

The constituency with both the lowest growth and the lowest overall property prices in England and Wales is Easington in County Durham. Together with Middlesbrough South & Cleveland, Hartlepool, Bradford West and Blackpool South, the five with the lowest house price growth from 2009 Q2 to 2024 Q2 are all in northern England.

This overall price is the weighted average of the housing prices over time, combined with housing stock proportions from census data. From the census 2021 housing stock data, we can get a sense of the relative importance of each property category to housing prices in each of these areas.

The full detail for every constituency, including price levels as well as growth rates and stock proportions for every property type, can be explored in this interactive dashboard.

Results for travel to work areas

While the analysis of what is happening in a constituency provides a fascinating local perspective, travel to work areas tell the broader economic story.

There is marked difference between regions and even between some adjacent areas. This shows the overall index of house price growth, which includes the rate of change of terraces, semidetached, detached houses and flat, combined by their census proportions, in travel to work areas centred around the cities of Bristol, London, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle.

The full detail for every travel to work area, including price levels as well as growth rates for every property type, can be explored in this interactive dashboard.

Whats next

I’ll be unearthing more interesting comparisons I found from this analysis, and publishing brand new analysis of housing, infrastructure, and socioeconomic statistics right here. Please subscribe for free to receive my latest updates!

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Acknowledgements

This analysis includes HMLR and ONS data made available under the open government license, an excellent initiative which has been adopted by public sector organisations in the UK and many other countries. In particular, this analysis is built on HM Land Registry’s Price Paid dataset. The following relevant information is noted on the use statement:

“Under the OGL, HM Land Registry permits you to use the Price Paid Data for commercial or non-commercial purposes. However, OGL does not cover the use of third party rights, which we are not authorised to license.

Price Paid Data contains address data processed against Ordnance Survey’s AddressBase Premium product, which incorporates Royal Mail’s PAF® database (Address Data).”