England and Wales House Price Analysis

https://jasmcole.com/2016/04/17/england-and-wales-house-prices/

by mhb • 10 years ago

153 60 10 years ago

jasmcole.com

victorantos• 10 years ago

How can this post have 51 points,be second on the front page and have only one comment?

dijit3• 10 years ago

People read it, think it's interesting enough to be shared but have nothing valuable to add to the topic.

Like yourself.

madaxe_again2• 10 years ago

This is just beautiful - lovely visualisations that make patterns in the data pop out at you. High resolution point map is at https://jasmcole.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/countrymap_nofi... - for some reason the image in the article isn't linked.

One interesting one is that London appears to be the only city in England and Wales where the inner city has higher property values than the suburbs - but we already knew that - post-industrial urban rot is taking time to heal. This also illustrates the steady growth of conurbations as the author observes - the rich one in the south-east, and the poor one in the north-west.

Also - what on earth happened in London in January 2010? That's a "market adjustment" if I've ever seen one. Perhaps a single large landlord dumped their portfolio...

At this point, London may as well be a city-state enclave.

omh• 10 years ago

what on earth happened in London in January 2010?

There were stamp duty changes in 2010. So for the right priced house you'd have paid signifcantly less tax on 1/1/2010 than on 31/12/2009.

That graph does seem to have a lot of "jumps" though, I'd be interested to know why. It may just be an artifact of how often different areas report?

robotresearcher3• 10 years ago

may as well be a city-state enclave.

It's had one of those for a very long time. The City of London is historically a corporation run largely by trade guilds. The City (as locals know it - London doesn't have a downtown) has its own rules.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London

lifeisstillgood• 10 years ago

Several in fact. One of my favourite parts of London is middle Temple, which for a period was a walled city, with its own army, that defend the rights of its lawyers to ... do lawyering. The 13th century was interesting down by the strand.

tostitos1979• 10 years ago

This showcases the power of open data. Love the graphs and especially the flyover.

Brakenshire2• 10 years ago

Unfortunately the Land Registry is in the process of being privatized. If that goes through, it seems very unlikely this data will stay open.

flashm6• 10 years ago

Really? Where did you hear that?

flashm6• 10 years ago

This is really great. Even more interesting since I live in one of the very, very red parts in the south east so have a particular interest in how much my house is earning each year - a lot more than me, as it turns out.

dijit3• 10 years ago

The rest of us who were not old enough to work & buy a home before it became unattainable are very envious.

switch007• 10 years ago

Yes, especially the born-and-bred Southerners who are migrating North for a bit of stability in their lives, leaving behind their friends and family. :(

Chris_Newton3• 10 years ago

Spare a thought for those of us who were just about old enough to work and buy a home, but instead decided to invest in starting a business or two. :-(

Even having had some modest success with those businesses, I expect we’d have made considerably more return on the initial capital by now if we’d simply bought almost any cheap property here in Cambridge and traded up over the years since, and we could have done it without all the commitment and hard work that goes into getting a business up and running.

The thing that is most infuriating is that the property market is being artificially propped up again and again, both though schemes that pump more money into the market and through planning restrictions that mean we don’t build anything like enough new homes to meet demand. This is great if you have a small portfolio of buy-to-lets or perhaps if you’ve reached a stage where you want to downsize, but not really for anyone else and certainly not for those who just want to buy (or build) a home for their family to live in instead of as an investment vehicle.

J-dawg2• 10 years ago

What could be more indicative of a completely dysfunctional economy? When a non-productive asset 'makes' more money than someone going out and doing productive work.

retube• 10 years ago

Why do you consider a house "non-productive"? If you want to test how non-productive a house is I suggest trying to make do without one.

buserror3• 10 years ago

Have you factored the tax you would pay on any money you make? Thats 40% -- if you take this into consideration, price rises aren't THAT extraordinary...

I'm also one of the lucky one whose house price has risen by 25% over the last 2.5 years. However, it means I'd have to pay 40% tax on that delta, leaving me in no position to buy anything equivalent (let alone better) in the same area.

The only people who 'profit' are people who want to seriously downsize or leave the 'red' areas. Everyone else is on the same mad train, apart from the banks, solicitors, insurers, estate agents, 'developers' and other bubble hangers on.

jameshart2• 10 years ago

Are you sure about that tax situation? I'm not a UK taxpayer any more, but my understanding is that you shouldn't pay 40% on increased valuation of your home for selling it.

1) asset appreciation will be taxed at capital gains rates, not marginal income rates. That tops out at 28%, not 40% 2) with some exceptions, primary dwellings aren't subject to capital gains tax when sold.

flashm6• 10 years ago

Fortunately in the UK you don't pay capital gains tax on the property you live in.

You pay it on your second property I believe, but only if you sell, and only if it is a second property at that point.

CGT is also only 10% or 20% depending on your earning situation.

ed_blackburn• 10 years ago

Fantastic what can be achieved with open data.

I have a feeling this won't be possible in the future though: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/24/land-registr...

spangry• 10 years ago

What a disgrace. The Shakespeare Review was commissioned by the UK Government in 2012 and basically recommended the exact opposite: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/shakespeare-revie...

...all PSI [public sector information] is derived from and paid for by the citizen and should therefore be considered as being owned by the citizen. It is the therefore the duty of government to make PSI as open as possible to create the maximum value to the nation.
The high-quality core should be enshrined as National Core Reference Data... Within such National Core Reference Data we would also expect to find the connective tissue of place and location, the administrative building blocks of registered legal entities, the details of land and property ownership.
One would be hard-pressed to find any expert who... would advocate the current Trading Fund model (for Companies House, Land Registry, the Met Office and Ordnance Survey) in today’s world of open data. One would question the current quasi-commercial Trading Fund model, in favour of one which would be responsible for high quality and transparent data production [and] publishing this as open data...

It's the same story in Australia with our Tory government. None of them seem to comprehend the very basic economics of open data: they are unwittingly creating a private natural monopoly instead of setting socially optimal prices for a public good (the data). And since the socially optimal price for an infinitely reproducible and non-rivalrous good is usually its marginal cost of production, the price should be set at approximately 0 (i.e. free).

alva• 10 years ago

I have absolutely no clue why they think this is a good idea.

The Land Registry is one of the few governmental departments that actually turns a profit! Average is £80m a year if I remember correctly. Apart from that, I think having this data controlled by a private company will make the waters over housing ownership even murkier in Britain.

esja2• 10 years ago

Well if it already turns a profit, imagine how great it will be for the new owners when they start charging more for public access to public data. And imagine how hard it will be for Private Eye and others to dig into the corruption which is endemic in the UK property market. Some people (if they really qualify as human) see those as positives rather than negatives.

flashm6• 10 years ago

Here are some more datasets provided by HM's Government, there are a lot of interesting sets: https://data.gov.uk/data/search

jasmcole4• 10 years ago

Author here, please feel free to ask any questions.

pbhjpbhj3• 10 years ago

Great article - presumably you work quite closely to this sort of data?

After a very brief view it seems that the lowest house prices have/are falling and the higher ones are rising (I'm pretty sure you mentioned that somewhere there), is that what stands out the most in your observations of the data?

I'll get to read it properly later ...

Also, one typo: "for pointing these out the existence of these.".

jasmcole4• 10 years ago

Thanks! I don't work at all with this type of data though (I'm a physicist), so my interpretation of it will be mostly guesswork I'm afraid (though I welcome learned comments!).

The divergence in house prices seems to be real, and would correspond to the historically high 'Gini' coefficient of the price distribution. This seems to have been falling recently however, which might represent a turning point in the price divergence.

wyldfire• 10 years ago

I've bookmarked the blender video you linked to, I'd love to explore a visualization of data like this: not just a static geo color map but elevation + flythrough. Those annotations for city names are nice too.

jasmcole4• 10 years ago

Thanks. The video was quite fun to make, I might write up the process in the future. Essentially I made a surface mesh in Matlab, exported to .stl format, which is then importable in Blender.

The city names are text objects with a rotation locked to the camera normal during the flythrough.

binarymax• 10 years ago

Have you considered intersecting this with another dataset, perhaps crime rate or suchother?

Personally I noticed that the coastline is more or less green, apart from a couple areas (such as Brighton). Which seems strange to me, as I am biased to think that seafront is usually more expensive than countryside in other countries.

--EDIT-- Oh and thanks for sharing! Very interesting work.

pjc502• 10 years ago

The sea is rather cold, and the seaside towns were prosperous in the last century's seaside holiday boom but have declined since air travel and the collapse of fishing. Nowadays people living there are more likely to be retired or unemployed.

Property value is very strongly linked to travel time to London.

jasmcole4• 10 years ago

Thanks for your interest. I'd like a map of earnings by postcode, then I can plot as a function of average yearly wage which would reduce the height of the London mountain in this dataset. There are a lot of goodies in the data provided by the gov.uk website, I'll be sure to have more of a poke around in the future.

evelynwaugh• 10 years ago

"The Welsh character is an interesting study," said Dr. Fagan. "I have often considered writing a little monograph on the subject, but I was afraid it might make me unpopular in the village. The ignorant speak of them as Celts, which is of course wholly erroneous. They are of pure Iberian stock-- the aboriginal inhabitants of Europe who survive only in Portugal and the Basque district. Celts readily intermarry with their neighbours and absorb them. From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with human-kind except their own blood relations. In Wales there was no need for legislation to prevent the conquering people intermarrying with the conquered. In Ireland that was necessary, for there intermarriage was a political matter. In Wales it was moral. I hope, by the way, you have no Welsh blood?"

"None whatever," said Paul.

"I was sure you had not, but one cannot be too careful. I once spoke of this subject to the sixth form and learned later that one of them had a Welsh grandmother. I am afraid it hurt his feelings terribly, poor little chap. She came from Pembrokeshire, too, which is of course quite a different matter. I often think," he continued, "that we can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales. Think of Edward of Carnarvon, the first Prince of Wales, a perverse life, Pennyfeather, and an unseemly death, then the Tudors and the dissolution of the Church, then Lloyd George, the temperance movement, Nonconformity and lust stalking hand in hand through the country, wasting and ravaging. But perhaps you think I exaggerate? I have a certain rhetorical tendency, I admit."

"No, no," said Paul.

"The Welsh," said the Doctor, "are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing," he said with disgust, "sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver...."

        --Dr. Fagan, a schoolmaster in Decline and Fall (1928), by Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)

gazrogers• 10 years ago

What does this bring to the discussion, other than your apparent delight in anti-Welsh bigotry?

England and Wales House Price Analysis

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