
England and Wales House Price Analysis - mhb
https://jasmcole.com/2016/04/17/england-and-wales-house-prices/
======
ed_blackburn
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...](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/24/land-registry-
faces-privatisation)

~~~
alva
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.

~~~
esja
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.

~~~
tobylane
The new owners won't be allowed to raise the prices and the whole thing is
guaranteed by the government. It seems likely that it'll still be considered a
public organisation like National Rail.

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madaxe_again
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...](https://jasmcole.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/countrymap_nofilt.png?w=12000)
\- 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.

~~~
robotresearcher
> 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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
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.

~~~
robotresearcher
Right, and one of this sweet little cluster of neighbouring cities was
Westminster, which ended up running the largest empire in history. And now, a
hundred years later, arguably the City of London is more important than
Westminster.

------
jasmcole
Author here, please feel free to ask any questions.

~~~
binarymax
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.

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

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tostitos1979
This showcases the power of open data. Love the graphs and especially the
flyover.

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

~~~
flashm
Really? Where did you hear that?

~~~
esja
It was announced (cynically) just before the Easter break. I think it's their
second attempt to do this. Considering the Panama Papers etc. it's ridiculous
that they are making moves to reduce transparency and accountability.

~~~
toyg
_> Considering the Panama Papers etc. it's ridiculous _

On the contrary, it's absolutely coherent. They enact policies to favour their
own class, which is the class of people owning accounts in Panama and lots of
real-estate.

What is ridiculous is the amount of people who do not belong to such class
(and likely never will, regardless of ambitions) and still vote for them over
and over.

------
flashm
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.

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

~~~
Chris_Newton
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.

~~~
buserror
Well a deeper problem is the 'home' thing. I'm an immigrant from France, and
I'm always /amazed/ at the fact that _everyone want a house_ No wonder there
is property shortage, as most of the space is wasted.

Seriously. Take a parcel, make 5 tiny houses with matching tiny garages... In
france on that surface you would have a block perhaps 3 story high of 20
luxury flats with underground garage, electric gates etc.

Sure, it wouldn't be be dream 'detached house' thing, but perhaps it's time
for the way british people see their 'home' to evolve with the resources they
have...

I know quite a lot of people in France who owns a flat. THEIR flat, and it
doesn't feel less like 'home' than the random tiny estate 'semi detached' in
ASBOland.

~~~
Chris_Newton
Maybe you simply make better flats in France. I lived much of my young adult
life in rented flats, and they were horrible.

One had such a damp problem that the main bedroom was uninhabitable, but it
took months to figure out who was responsible for fixing it and get the
required permissions. In reality, I moved out as soon as I could at the end of
the initial tenancy period so I never saw that work done.

One was flooded from an upstairs flat where the plumbing failed. We literally
had two large police officers trying to break its door down for several
minutes to gain access for the emergency plumber before we discovered that the
neighbour had been in all along and somehow slept through everything.

In the next one, you couldn’t walk around or talk normally late at night for
fear of the downstairs neighbours getting irate at the noise. Don’t even think
about turning up the TV, playing a musical instrument, or running a washing
machine after 8pm!

It would take a degree of desperation I have never been unlucky enough to
experience for me to ever live in a flat again, or a level of build quality
and isolation far beyond anything I have ever experienced in any flat I have
lived in or visited.

~~~
buserror
Yes I appreciate that paper-thin walls aren't going to cut it, that's why I
mentioned 'luxury' flats....

I lived in quite a few in France, and I remember playing electric guitar,
loudly, at 3am in one and the neigbours couldn't hear it!

They did object about the Djembe session tho :-)

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

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

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

Like yourself.

