House price statistics for small areas in England and Wales: year ending September 2021

• The median price paid for residential properties in Lower-layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) in England ranged from £25,000 (within Sunderland) to £4,900,000 (within Kensington and Chelsea) in the year ending September 2021.

• The median price paid for residential properties in LSOAs in Wales ranged from £60,000 (within Blaenau Gwent) to £650,000 (within Vale of Glamorgan) in the year ending September 2021.

• The number of residential property sales in England increased by 23.7% to 804,417 between the year ending September 2020 and the year ending September 2021; the number of residential property sales in Wales increased by 20.1% to 41,261 over the same period.

• The number of transactions of flats and maisonettes increased the least out of all property types in both England and Wales (8.4% and 3.0% respectively) between the year ending September 2020 and the year ending September 2021.

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. The most frequently downloaded datasets are as follows.

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 34,759 LSOAs in England and Wales, each containing between 400 and 1,200 households. More information can be found by visiting our Census geography page.

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, which is a term referring to peaks and troughs in property transactions at particular times of the year. It also reduces the impact of registration lag, which is where transactions are registered by HM Land Registry sometime after the completion date.

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 UK House Price Index (UK HPI) bulletins. 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 our House price statistics for small areas (HPSSAs) QMI.

Quality

More quality and methodology information on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in our House price statistics for small areas QMI.

Proposed changes

The House price statistics for small areas datasets provide annual statistics that are updated quarterly. We are considering changing some of the datasets to a single, annual publication where we provide data for the year. For example, instead of having "year ending March 2020", "year ending June 2020", "year ending September 2020" and "year ending December 2020", we would only publish "year ending December 2020" to cover the whole of 2020. Before we make this change, we would like feedback on this from our users. If you have any feedback about this proposed change, please email hpi@ons.gov.uk.