England and Wales House Price Analysis
jasmcole.com
jasmcole.com
I have a feeling this won't be possible in the future though: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/24/land-registr...
> ...all PSI [public sector information] is derived from and paid for by the citizen and should therefore be considered as being owned by the citizen. It is the therefore the duty of government to make PSI as open as possible to create the maximum value to the nation.
> The high-quality core should be enshrined as National Core Reference Data... Within such National Core Reference Data we would also expect to find the connective tissue of place and location, the administrative building blocks of registered legal entities, the details of land and property ownership.
> One would be hard-pressed to find any expert who... would advocate the current Trading Fund model (for Companies House, Land Registry, the Met Office and Ordnance Survey) in today’s world of open data. One would question the current quasi-commercial Trading Fund model, in favour of one which would be responsible for high quality and transparent data production [and] publishing this as open data...
It's the same story in Australia with our Tory government. None of them seem to comprehend the very basic economics of open data: they are unwittingly creating a private natural monopoly instead of setting socially optimal prices for a public good (the data). And since the socially optimal price for an infinitely reproducible and non-rivalrous good is usually its marginal cost of production, the price should be set at approximately 0 (i.e. free).
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.
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.
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.
There were stamp duty changes in 2010. So for the right priced house you'd have paid signifcantly less tax on 1/1/2010 than on 31/12/2009.
That graph does seem to have a lot of "jumps" though, I'd be interested to know why. It may just be an artifact of how often different areas report?
After a very brief view it seems that the lowest house prices have/are falling and the higher ones are rising (I'm pretty sure you mentioned that somewhere there), is that what stands out the most in your observations of the data?
I'll get to read it properly later ...
Also, one typo: "for pointing these out the existence of these.".
The divergence in house prices seems to be real, and would correspond to the historically high 'Gini' coefficient of the price distribution. This seems to have been falling recently however, which might represent a turning point in the price divergence.
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.
Property value is very strongly linked to travel time to London.
The city names are text objects with a rotation locked to the camera normal during the flythrough.
"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)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.
However, I did vote Blue, and I agree with the principal of small Government and that more should be privatised. Can't have my cake and eat it I suppose.
I used to think much as you do, until I saw behind the veil and came to realise that while I agree with privatisation in principle, the practice actually comprises a land grab by vested interests who do have their cake and eat it too, as they usually not only get to keep their profits from their monopolies but get government subsidies and grants to boot. If anything, it's "champagne socialism", where the state lines private pockets - which is also known as fascism.
I don't believe technocratic centralised socialistic management is the solution - rather, government by those who do not wish to govern and cannot abuse their position to foster their private interests (sortition holds appeal), and strong regulation of private industry with real teeth.
Ironically state monopolies can be very good for small business. The land registry support an ecosystem of companies that help people navigate the arcane system. A private company could just absorb a lot of this and kill variety and competition.
You should review this position if you think the Land Registry should not be privatised. Mostly there isn't much left to privatise that isn't an administrative function or health or education.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-18150806
>'[Home Sec. Theresa May] added: "It is right that forces up and down the country are now looking... at bringing in the private sector to their forces where they feel there are functions that can be done more cost-effectively by the private sector."'
Why make things cheaper for everyone by running national functions from taxation when you can make them more expensive and share - perhaps at a distance - in the profits? /pure-cynicism which I hope is misplaced.
Selling my own data to me sounds like more work to do.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
Put another way, my objection in this case is not to those who have successfully invested in property ownership, whether politicians or not; it is to the fact that doing so was a viable option in the first place, because the housing market has been systematically manipulated over many years now to artificially inflate the value of properties. This gives a false sense of security to a lot of people, and for the same reason, it makes it politically difficult to implement policy that will restore some sense of proportionality to house prices, such as significantly loosening planning rules so we can simply build more homes.
That is what needs to change, IMHO. The value of a property can be whatever the market wants it to be, given what the land it’s on is worth and what it costs to build and connect up and so on, but we shouldn’t be forever inflating the market by artificially making property a scarce resource.
I'm also one of the lucky one whose house price has risen by 25% over the last 2.5 years. However, it means I'd have to pay 40% tax on that delta, leaving me in no position to buy anything equivalent (let alone better) in the same area.
The only people who 'profit' are people who want to seriously downsize or leave the 'red' areas. Everyone else is on the same mad train, apart from the banks, solicitors, insurers, estate agents, 'developers' and other bubble hangers on.
1) asset appreciation will be taxed at capital gains rates, not marginal income rates. That tops out at 28%, not 40% 2) with some exceptions, primary dwellings aren't subject to capital gains tax when sold.
You pay it on your second property I believe, but only if you sell, and only if it is a second property at that point.
CGT is also only 10% or 20% depending on your earning situation.
Like yourself.