House price statistics for small areas in England and Wales: year ending December 2019

• The median price paid for residential properties in England ranged from £22,500 (within Sunderland) to £5,300,000 (within Westminster) in the year ending December 2019.

• The median price paid for residential properties in Wales ranged from £45,750 (within Rhondda Cynon Taf) to £630,000 (within Cardiff) in the year ending December 2019.

• The number of residential property sales in England fell by 7.0% to 767,813 and in Wales fell by 6.4% to 44,340.

• The number of transactions of flats and maisonettes fell by more than any other property type in both England and Wales (14.8% and 13.9% respectively).

There are 49 datasets in total, which show house prices by property type for various geographies in England and Wales as well as the number of property transactions. Here are the most frequently downloaded datasets.

Lower-layer Super Output Area (LSOA)

A Lower-layer Super Output Area (LSOA) is a geographic hierarchy designed to improve the reporting of small area statistics in England and Wales. There are 34,753 LSOAs in England and Wales, each containing between 400 and 1,200 households. More information can be found by visiting the Census geography page.

Housing market value

The housing market value refers to the total value of residential property transactions in an area. It is determined by a combination of property prices and the number of property transactions. This can be used to provide an overview of the scale of the property transaction economy.

Data collection

The house price statistics for small areas (HPSSAs) use data from HM Land Registry to provide statistics on the price paid and number of residential property transactions for properties that were sold in England and Wales. Properties sold at a discount to the market level, such as properties sold under the Right to Buy scheme, are not included in these statistics.

HPSSAs are updated quarterly, adding a new 12-month period to the data. The use of rolling annual data removes seasonal effects (that is, peaks and troughs in property transactions at particular times of the year) and reduces the impact of registration lag (that is, where transactions are registered by HM Land Registry some time after the date on which they are completed).

Differences to other house price statistics

There are two sets of official statistics for house prices. In addition to these HPSSAs, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) also produces the UK House Price Index (UK HPI). The HPSSAs measure the number of property transactions and the price paid for properties sold in a given period, whereas the UK HPI provides a measure of the changing value of properties in the housing market. The differences and uses of these outputs are explained in more detail in Section 5 of the HPSSAs QMI.

Quality

More quality and methodology information on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in the HPSSAs QMI.