House prices in 2021 (in England and Wales)

A few maps and notes today as I try to catch up with the latest release of the HPSSA house price data from ONS. HPSSA? It stands for 'house price statistics for small areas', and it covers England and Wales. There are loads of different datasets and sometimes finding what you're looking for can be a bit fiddly so I put together a very basic, single page with links to them all. The good news? You can get small area house prices going back a full quarter century now, to the final quarter of 1995. Yes, way back in the mists of time. This is what the house price map of England and Wales looked like then - this is for the four quarters from the final quarter of 1995. Get yourself a time machine and snap up a bargain in central London - treat yourself!

Snap up a bargain while you can!

Fast forward 25 years and, you will be shocked to learn, the pattern is much the same and unless you have access to giant wads of cash, you are not going to be buying a big house in London any time soon. You really did need a map to tell you that, right?

Amazingly surprising patterns

But of course these maps don't change very much over time, save for a few little pockets here and there, or a bit of spread outwards from London or a few other high price areas - which I've tried to label. 

What I find most interesting - apart from this consistency over time, and the eye-wateringly expensive areas in inner London - is the extremes and the spatial patterns. So here are a few maps on that, below. 

By the way, I've chosen a £250k cut-off for the middle category as it's close to the average house price at the end of 2020. Or at least one version of the average. The London average is a bit over £500k now but my last category starts just a little bit below that. If you look at the maps below it's easier to pick out the 'southern bits in the north' (e.g. Wilmslow) or the 'northern bits in the south' (e.g. Portsmouth?) - at least as far as prices and perceptions of them sometimes go. I don't want to start one of those north-south wars that seem very popular on Twitter these days, particularly since all these places are incredibly far south anyway 😉.

The high and low categories together

Just the most expensive areas

Just the least expensive areas

Want the data? Here's my web page list with all the data - take your pick. The data I've used here is from dataset 46 and was last updated at the end of March 2021. How will the Covid-19 situation pan out in relation to house prices over the short, medium and long-term. No idea, but I'll keep following Neal Hudson's latest updates to keep on top of all that.

It's a bit ugly, but it still works

1996, eh? Now that seems like a loooooong time ago. Mind you, so does 2019. Is there any kind of north-south divide in house prices though? Hmm, hard to say.

Again, not exactly surprising

And one of those 'how it started, how it's going' things to end, since the data series goes back so far.

Quite interesting if you look really closely

Local House Price Growth in England and Wales, 1995 to 2016

On the BBC website and news today there's a great story about house price growth in England and Wales over the last decade. It uses ward-level house price data to track changes over the past decade. I wasn't aware until relatively recently that the ONS had done a lot of the leg-work with HM Land Registry price paid data and aggregated it all to smaller geographies. They publish it down to MSOA level as 'house price statistics for small areas', and very nice it is too. There's median price, lower quartile and a range of other indicators. Naturally, I wanted to see what this looked like, but I thought it would have to be simplified. What I did was take two market price points - £200k and £500k (as very rough approximations for national and London averages) and map the spread of house price growth since 1995. Here's what it looks like in a 30 second animated gif. The geography is the MSOA, with an average population of about 5,400.

Watch this on loop for best effect

I wonder if I should post all the individual frames of this below? Okay, go on then. And you should be able to click to open then in a larger size in a new tab/window. It's interesting that after 2008 there appears to be a geographical contraction and also a bit more volatility and less uniformity of spread - and by 2016 you see a big chunk of the London area in dark red (over £500k average).

Okay, so we can really tell that by 2016 in most MSOAs across England and Wales house prices are at £200k or above and in a good chunk of London and the South (and a few areas elsewhere, notably Cornwall and south Manchester) they are £500k or more. That's all for now. I'll leave you with the same gif as above, but this time at 1 second per frame, plus another earlier version with the year label in the top right.

Slightly different design, same data