The free-to-download House Price Analytics app brings together data from each of the main house price indices – Rightmove, Zoopla, Halifax, Nationwide, LSL and eighteen years of house price data from HM Land Registry – to enable home buyers and sellers to better understand house price figures in their respective context, and reveal the real reasons why some portals suggest the average asking price for a home in the UK is £252,418 when other indices state the average price of properties sold is £167,063.
Developed jointly by Agent Analytics and Roambi the House Price Analytics app enables property market observers, homebuyers and sellers and estate agents to make accurate and informed observations about the UK property market.
By gathering all the main indices on one app, House Price Analytics reveals some major index misinterpretations:
- House price portals substantially over-estimate London values as they use a mean average, thereby allowing the most expensive property listed at £68m to unduly influence figures.
- There are over 1,283 properties currently listed in London with an average asking price of more than £5m. A random sample of ten properties valued at over £20m reveals that they are all listed with more than one estate agency, and some as many as six. As the house price portals take a mean average of all listings, the result is a massively overinflated valuation figure, suggesting that the London ‘property bubble’ is smaller than reported.
- Just 9.5% of properties listed in the UK are marked ‘Under Offer’ or ‘Sold STC’ (subject-to-contract), compared to 54.8 percent of properties under £5m. The result is pricing that is skewed in favour of properties at the top of the market that are failing to sell, which is almost always due to overpricing.
- HM Land Registry data – which accurately reports sales prices actually achieved – excludes new build properties (20% of the market) and any properties that are selling for the first time since 1995. These are more likely to be larger properties which change hands less frequently than smaller ones as they are at the top of the housing ladder.
Richard Rawlings, partner at House Price Analytics, said: “The use of data analytics to reveal misinterpretations in the reporting of house prices will prove to be an invaluable tool in the great UK property-price debate.
“For the first time, House Price Analytics gathers all of the information and data in one place, and the findings are already astounding.
“House Price Analytics gives users highly interactive visualisations of the various indices to provide far greater detail about average speed of sale, transactional volumes, percentage of asking price achieved, time on the market and much more.
“For most consumers, purchasing a home represents the biggest single financial investment of a lifetime, so we are delighted to launch a tool that helps them obtain an accurate, and most importantly, intelligent, view of the property market.”
Steve Neat, Roambi’s senior vice president, EMEIA, said: “When the opportunity arose to work with Richard Rawlings and the Agent Analytics team on a next-generation house price analytics application, we leapt at the chance.
“We are aware that the reported fluctuations in UK property prices have been an issue for some time, and through our work with Agent Analytics and the data sourced from each of the main indices, we are confident that Roambi Analytics is the perfect tool to display this information in an easy-to-use, highly digestible format. By combining all these factors, we feel that the House Price Analytics app will provide unrivalled insight into this hot-button topic.”
