FOI Reference: FOI/2022/4171
You asked
For the last 60 months how many house sales were included in your initial estimate as a percentage of all house sales for each month?
For the last 60 months what percentage of house sales made up the final figure of total house sales for each month?
For the last 60 months please provide your initial HPI and final HPI monthly percentages?
The chart will look like this example:
Jan 2018 40.5% 0.7% 84.6% 0.8%
Feb 2018 39.8% 1.2% 80.7% 0.7%
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
The number of house sales included in the initial estimate of the UK House Price Index (HPI) are not made publicly available until two months later. This is because the sales volume dataset contains counts of all sales included in the electronic register at the time of data extraction. The data collection delay mainly affects the most recent months and as such, the two most recent months are therefore omitted from this data to avoid reporting misleading volumes. We do hold this information within our systems, however retrieving the information for the past 60 months, as requested, would be a resource intensive process which would need to be requested as a bespoke analysis and would be subject to ONS's charging policy.
The number of house sales included in the final estimate of the UK HPI are available in the Sales (landregistry.gov.uk) data download spreadsheet available from the HM Land Registry's website (which can be filtered by Region). However, please note that these will only be final estimates up until March 2021 -- any period after this will still be subject to revision under our 12 month revisions policy.
Where you are requesting the initial and final estimates as a percentage of all house sales for each month, we have interpreted this as a reference to the total housing transaction numbers as published by HM Revenue and Customs (UK monthly property transactions tables (publishing.service.gov.uk)). This dataset is not produced by ONS and as such we do not hold the information within our systems. As above, if you would like for us to calculate percentages based on this publicly available data, it would be possible, but would be subject to ONS's charging policy as a bespoke analysis.
In relation to your request for the initial HPI and final HPI monthly percentages, we are unsure if you are referring to month-on-month growth rates, or month-on-year growth rates (our headline measure of HPI). The final HPI percentages (both month-on-month and month-on-year) are available in the UK HPI full file (landregistry.gov.uk) on HM Land Registry's website (although, as with the transaction numbers, these will only be final estimates up until March 2021 as any period after this will be subject to revision under the 12 month revisions window). The initial growth rate percentages are not readily available for a 60 month time span in a single file. They are retrievable from previous versions of the UK revisions (landregistry.gov.uk) tables. Due to the resource required to produce this information for you in the format you have requested, it would again need to be requested as bespoke analysis, which would be at a charge in line with our charging policy.
If you would like us to carry out any of this work for you, please do let us know. The timing in which we could provide such analysis would also be dependent on other priorities relating to our regular publications and ongoing analytical work.
If you would like to obtain bespoke analysis, please contact the Housing Market Indices branch directly via our email: HPI@ons.gov.uk. Or alternatively, the Prices Team would be happy to arrange a call to discuss in more detail if that would be helpful, so that we can better understand your query, explain what data we have readily available within our systems and whether there are alternatives ways to get the information you require. If you would like to schedule a call, please email the above inbox so that we can arrange a date and time that would be suitable.