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CASA Working Paper 216

Shedding new light on residential property price variation in England: a multiscale exploration

CASA Working Paper 216

6 March 2020

Exploring the nature of spatial and temporal variation in house prices is important because it can help better understand such issues as affordability and equity of access to housing. In the UK, research on house price variation has been hindered by a lack of extensive data linking the prices of properties at different places and times to their physical attributes. This paper addresses this gap through using a new dataset linking Land Registry Price Paid Data (PPD) to attribute data from Ordnance Survey (OS) and Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) datasets. The new data are used to investigate spatial disparities in England’s house prices at four geographical scales (from local authority to individual address) between 2009 and 2016 – a period of sustained price rises after the global financial crisis of 2008. Multilevel variance components models are used to estimate house price variation at different levels of spatial aggregation, and we compare spatial disparities in transaction price against the house price per square metre at different levels. Our results suggest that accounting for the size of properties by using house price (£/m2) offers a more accurate picture of house price variation than does the use of transaction prices at the same geographic scale. Spatial disparities in house price (£/m2) are more apparent and are seen to be clustered at local authority level and highly clustered at MSOA level, with imbalances increasing during this eight-year period and highlighting the strong and growing influence of London on the national housing market. 

Keywords: Housing, House price variation, multilevel modelling, England 

Authors: Bin Chi, Adam Dennett, Thomas Oléron-Evans & Robin Morphet

Download CASA Working Paper 216 (file size 1.9MB, file format PDF)