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On the up and up
The last thing we need is another house price index. There are six already, including an official index published by the Department for Communities and Local Government. But now another Government department has weighed in, writes Paul Lewis
Since November, the Land Registry has been publishing a monthly house price index and the average price of a home. It claims to be better than the other six because it knows the price of every house sold – the others use samples.
And Halifax and Nationwide, the two most widely quoted, only use data from their own mortgage sales. But details of every home that is sold in England and Wales are passed to the Land Registry. Indeed, for homes sold from April 2000 the price is recorded on the publicly available Land Register for everyone to see.
In addition, the Land Registry database of prices is now so extensive that it has a growing amount of data on the same home being sold more than once, providing a unique check that it is comparing like with like.
Other surveys try to achieve the same by using what they call "mix-adjusted averages", which ensure that the proportion of detached, semis, flats and bungalows is much the same month by month.
The new figures – together with those from Registers of Scotland – allow us to check the average price of a home in each region and how they have grown.
London tops the bill at £306,124, up 9.5% over the past 12 months. Only Scotland – at £142,355 – has grown faster, rising 12.5% in a year but to less than half the London price. The North East of England is at the bottom both for price, £119,775, and growth at just 1.9%. Figures for Northern Ireland are from Halifax and are not strictly comparable, though they do show a 30% rise to £167,391.
Despite the different methodologies and the different data the message is pretty constant. Although we’ve been told for years that house prices can’t go on rising for ever at this rate, the prices have not fallen since 1995 and are now treble the prices fetched then.
A year ago they were rising by about 3% a year. Now they are taking off again, increasing, the consensus is, by around 8% a year with an average price for a home of around £200,000. At present there is no end in sight.
Sources
Land Registry: landreg.gov.uk/houseprices
Registers of Scotland: ros.gov.uk/citizen/shp.html
Halifax: hbosplc.com/economy/housingresearch.asp
This article was created: 21 December 2006.
This article was last edited: 12 March 2007.
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