This is my latest article for the excellent Planning in London magazine. The number crunching of millions of property prices paid matched geospatially was only possible through this platform www.ukcrimestats.com which you can subscribe to at any time from just £2.99 a month.
Here are the first few words of the article;
A Martian landing in London today would fast realise that the capital’s number one obsession is property prices. It is just inescapable that for most Londoners, incomes have not kept pace with property prices and they have become poorer.
The average price of a London home in January 2000 was £179,821. In March 2016, it was £625,120. Even allowing for inflation from 2000-2015, the average home would be costing just over £270,000. No wonder then that London’s prospective first time buyers need a minimum annual income of £77,000, or three times the national average to get a mere foot on the property ladder.
Yet within these datasets from the Land Registry, a different story emerges, made only possible by the creation of a highly capable geospatial database, which goes far beyond any public facing property website – www.ukcrimestats.com.
And the planning implications are huge.