Tesseract Foundational Research: Housing & Property Data
What a year of transactions says about every local housing market
Local authorities are asked, again and again, to evidence their housing market: for a local plan, a strategic housing market assessment, a stock-condition programme, a viability study. The raw material is open and national, but it arrives as fourteen unlabelled columns and nine hundred thousand rows. This is a small, reproducible step that turns that raw material into a comparable indicator per authority, and is honest about what it can and cannot say.
The direction of travel
The evidence bar under local housing decisions keeps rising. The National Planning Policy Framework requires plans to rest on adequate, up-to-date and proportionate evidence of housing need and market conditions; the standard method for assessing local housing need and every strategic housing market assessment lean on transaction and price data. Stock-condition programmes, private-rented-sector databases and tenant-insight work all begin from the same question: what does this local market actually look like, and how does it compare to its neighbours?
HM Land Registry publishes the answer in the Price Paid Data, openly, under the Open Government Licence. What is missing is not the data; it is the last mile that makes it comparable.
The method: aggregate honestly, attribute cleanly
Every standard transaction in the 2025 Price Paid file carries a local-authority district, so each sale is attributed to its authority directly, with no postcode lookup to introduce error. We count only standard price-paid transactions (the category that excludes repossessions and bulk or non-market transfers), then compute ten indicators per authority. The build is a single script over the open CSV; anyone can re-run it and get the same numbers.
| Indicator | What it captures |
|---|---|
| Transaction volume | Count of standard price-paid (open-market) residential sales in the authority in the year. |
| Median & quartile price | The median, lower-quartile and upper-quartile sale price, so the spread of a market is visible, not just its midpoint. |
| New-build share | Share of transactions that are new-build, an indicator of where supply is actually being added. |
| Leasehold share | Share of transactions sold leasehold, a proxy for the flatted and managed-estate segment. |
| Property-type mix | The split across detached, semi-detached, terraced, flat and other, the shape of the local stock that trades. |
What it is, and what it is not
This is a market activity indicator set: what sold, and for how much, in the open market this year. It is deliberately not a dwelling-stock census. It says nothing about homes that did not transact, and a low-volume authority will have a noisier median than a high-volume one. Stating that plainly is the point: an indicator you can trust is one whose limits are on the label. The transaction count sits next to every price precisely so a user can judge how much weight the median will bear.
Where this goes
The same pipeline extends cleanly: multiple years for a time series, lower-quartile-price-to-earnings for an affordability ratio, or a join to deprivation and stock data for a fuller market picture. It is the property-market companion to our Welsh Government land-valuation research, which tested valuation methods across 1,916 Welsh geographies; both start from the same conviction that land and property questions should be answered from open data, reproducibly.
Independent, self-initiated open research built entirely from public data. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Not endorsed by HM Land Registry.
Explore the open dataset
Indicators for all 318 authorities as CSV and JSON, plus the reproducible build.
