UK Yield
House Sales

Exploring 20 years of house sales data in the UK

Description
When?

December 2015

Why?

Looking at house prices by geography to help determine if/where I should buy a house.

Tools and Techniques
  • Open Data
  • APIs (Accessing Zoopla API with Python)
  • SQL
  • Tableau (With Custom Geocoding)

For some time I have been considering investing in a property – in fact this was part of my rationale for forming a company to contract. My main motivation was in buying a property to let, rather than for myself, so an important aspect is the rental yield. However, it is also important to guard against the risk of house prices going down, and hence the possibility of negative equity.

To this end, I have created a couple of analyses to help decide if and where I should invest:

  • The first uses land registry open data to explore and visualise all property sales in the last 20 years, across the country – with this I can begin to understand the volume and trends in house prices regionally.
  • The second combines this data with rental price data from Zoopla, to give an impression of the supply and prices of rental properties in each area.

See the Dashboard on Tableau Public

For further analysis into potential rental tenant demographics I will fold in further data from the UK census. Although quite dated, this should give some initial impression of student vs young professional vs family areas.

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