House price statistics for small areas in England and Wales: year ending June 2018

• The median price paid for residential properties in Lower layer Super Output Areas in England and Wales ranged from £25,000 (within Sunderland) to £5.925 million (within Barnet).

• The number of residential property transactions recorded by HM Land Registry in England and Wales fell 3.2% to 865,913 in the year ending June 2018.

• Transactions of flats and maisonettes in the year ending June 2018 fell 9.1% from the previous year, a larger fall than any other property type.

• The nominal total value of residential property transactions (unadjusted for inflation) decreased most in London in the year ending June 2018.

• Sales of flats and maisonettes have formed an increasing part of London’s housing market value while detached properties formed an increasing part of housing market value in the North East.

Definitions and data sources

The house price statistics for small areas (HPSSAs) use data from HM Land Registry (LR) 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 market level, such as properties sold under the Right to Buy scheme, are not included in these statistics.

Revisions to the entire time series of HPSSAs back to the year ending December 1995 are only made if LR makes significant amendments to historic underlying data or there is a change to the geographic information used to produce the statistics. Otherwise, revisions are only made to the statistics back to the year ending March 2011.

The statistics in this HPSSA publication are revised back to the year ending December 1995 and these data supersede all previously published HPSSA data, to ensure that:

• residential property transactions added to or edited in the LR Price Paid Data (PPD) are included, especially in more recent periods to which changes are more likely to relate

• if a geography change is made, the entire series reflects the new structure, avoiding geographic breaks in the time series

The smallest areas for which statistics are presented are Lower layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs), of which there are 34,753 in England and Wales, each containing around 600 households. More detailed statistics are presented for other geographies including Middle layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs). There are 7,201 MSOAs in England and Wales, each containing around 3,000 households. Statistics for these Super Output Areas therefore provide a detailed geographic understanding of the number and price paid for properties that were sold at market value.

Differences to other housing statistics

HPSSAs provide a different set of statistics to the UK House Price Index (UK HPI). The UK HPI is weighted to reflect the mix of properties sold in the previous year, which is broadly representative of the mix of properties in the overall dwelling stock. The HPSSAs are not mix-adjusted but use rolling year data periods to better reflect the actual mix of properties sold than is possible with a shorter period. This also avoids seasonal effects. The UK HPI provides a measure of the changing value of properties in the housing market, whereas the HPSSAs measure the price paid for properties sold in a given period. Therefore, the two sets of statistics are different.

The HPSSAs report the non-adjusted average transactional values down to the small area level and are therefore particularly useful when identifying the change in price for properties actually sold in a given period and area. Changes in the price paid reported in the HPSSAs can reflect actual changes in house prices or a change in the composition of properties that were sold. HPSSAs can also be used to identify changes in the number of property transactions, housing market value and the composition of transactions by property type.

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) also produce Quarterly Stamp Duty Statistics for local authority districts and Westminster Parliamentary constituencies (this publication no longer includes transactions from Wales as, since April 2018, Land Transaction Tax (LTT) has replaced Stamp Duty Land Tax in Wales). Like the HPSSAs these statistics report the number of property transactions but relate to a different subset of transactions. They include transactions of £40,000 or more and include some types of transactions that are not included in the HPSSAs, such as transactions that took place with a buy-to-let mortgage, which are not recorded in the data used to produce the HPSSAs. These differences mean that the number of transactions reported in the HPSSAs is lower than the number of transactions reported by HMRC.

In the year ending June 2018, the median price paid for residential properties in Lower layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) in England and Wales ranged from £25,000 (within Sunderland) to £5.925 million (within Barnet). Both the most expensive and the least expensive LSOAs were the same as in the previous year.

Figure 1 shows a map of the median price paid for LSOAs in England and Wales in the year ending June 2018. There were 367 LSOAs in which the median price paid was £1 million or more in the year ending June 2018, up from 359 the previous year. Out of the 367 LSOAs in which the median price paid was £1 million or more, 300 were in London (this represents 6.2% of London’s LSOAs).

Figure 1: Median price paid for all dwellings by Lower layer Super Output Area

England and Wales, year ending June 2018

In the year ending June 2018, the median price paid for residential properties increased in 64% of LSOAs in England and Wales where data were available (around 97% of LSOAs). The median price paid stayed the same in 1.26% of LSOAs and decreased in the rest. Figure 2 shows that the percentage of LSOAs with an increase in median price paid has dropped compared with the previous year, with a decrease of 5.5 percentage points since the year ending June 2017. This is the third consecutive annual drop.

The number of residential property transactions recorded by HM Land Registry in England and Wales fell 3.2% to 865,913 in the year ending June 2018, from 894,173 in the previous year. This was the second consecutive year in which the number of property transactions has decreased and is the lowest number of sales since the year ending June 2013.

Figure 3 shows a fall in the number of property transactions for all property types in the year ending June 2018 compared with the previous year. There was an overall decrease in property transactions of 28,260 sales. Flats and maisonettes was the largest contributor to this decrease, with 15,648 fewer transactions compared with the previous year (a fall of 9.1%). The next largest decrease was for terraced properties, of which there were 2.8% fewer transactions in the year ending June 2018 compared with the previous year.

Figure 4 shows the percentage of Lower layer Super Output Areas (LSOA) in which the number of property transactions increased compared with the previous year. In the year ending June 2018, of all LSOAs, 44% had an increase in the number of property transactions compared with the previous year, up from 37% for the year ending June 2017.

Housing market value is 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. These housing market value statistics are presented in nominal terms, which mean that they have not been adjusted to take account of price inflation and so they present the simple total transactional value of all property sales.

The total housing market value in England and Wales for the year ending June 2018 was £255 billion. This is a decrease of £1.6 billion on the previous year and is just under £31 billion less than the highest level of housing market value, which was in the year ending June 2007.

Figure 5 shows the total housing market value in nominal terms expressed as an index. The housing market value index was lower in the year ending June 2018 than the peak of 2007 for England and Wales overall, and for all English regions and Wales. In London the housing market value fell 5.1% in the year ending June 2018 compared with the previous year. This was the largest fall out of all English regions and Wales.

In the year ending June 2018, the East of England had the highest housing market value relative to the peak in 2007 (with an index of 95.9), despite having fallen 1.3% since the previous year. The North East had the lowest housing market value overall and lowest relative to the peak in 2007 (with an index of 68.9), although this increased 1% since the previous year.

Wales had the largest year-on-year increase in housing market value in the year ending June 2018, at 4.6%, despite an overall drop of 0.6% for England and Wales overall. This was the seventh consecutive annual increase in Wales. This was driven mainly by a 3.7% increase in the mean price paid for residential properties, while the number of property transactions recorded by HM Land Registry increased by 0.8%.

In terms of property types, the value of the housing market has changed in different areas over recent years. Figure 6 shows that sales of flats and maisonettes comprised nearly half of London’s housing market value in the year ending June 2018, up from 44% in 2007. In the rest of England and Wales overall, sales of flats comprised 10% of the housing market value, having fallen from 12.5% in 2007. Sales of detached properties comprised the largest share of housing market value in England and Wales excluding London, at 42%. This has increased from 37% in 2007.

The North East had the lowest housing market value in the year ending June 2018 and also in the year ending June 2007. Figure 7 shows that the composition of the property market in the North East has changed over this period. In the year ending June 2018, sales of detached properties comprised 38% of the housing market value, up from 27% in 2007. Sales of flats and maisonettes comprised a smaller share of the North East’s housing market value in the year ending June 2018 (6.6%) than in 2007 (12.4%).

Statistics for wards have been updated to be based on 2017 ward boundaries. Accordingly, statistics for these and all other geographies have been revised for the entire time series back to year ending December 1995.

More information about house prices can be found in the following publications:

UK House Price Index – monthly house price inflation in the UK.

Housing affordability in England and Wales – brings together data on house prices and annual earnings to provide a measure of housing affordability.

Quarterly Stamp Duty Statistics – Statistics on the number of property transactions from Stamp Duty records.

The House Price Statistics for Small Areas Quality and Methodology Information report contains important information on:

• the strengths and limitations of the data and how it compares with related data

• uses and users of the data

• how the output was created

• the quality of the output including the accuracy of the data