Introduction
House prices are booming in Britain. The average home got 10.8% more expensive in 2021.
To put it another way, that is £27,000 more expensive to an average of £275,000. That means a lot of people would have earned more (on paper) from their homes than their jobs last year.
Looking through the Land Registry’s Price Paid data, we can see that the proportion of new-builds in all property sales declined significantly as the Covid pandemic took hold in Britain.
In 2019 new homes made up 13% of all sales in the Land Registry’s database. In 2020 that fell to 9.9% and in 2021 it fell more steeply to just 2.8%.
The lockdowns, social distancing and sickness absence that Covid brought obviously slowed down housebuilding significantly.
Where were houses built during 2020 and 2021?
East London
Here is a map of sales of new-builds in Tower Hamlets, Newham and Hackney. I had to impute some postcodes and coordinates myself.
The sizes of the circles correlate to the number of homes sold at that location. This helps to capture the difference between 50 flats and a single detached house - same building, different story.
You can see that there have been some big developments in the Isle of Dogs. Skyscrapers such as the Landmark Pinnacle have gone up and dozens - sometimes hundreds - of flats have been sold in them.
Elsewhere, there has been a lot of development further along the river to the west of Thames Barrier Park.
Another point to note about the east London developments is that they are almost entirely flats. There have been more than 4,400 new-builds sold in these three London boroughs and all but nine of them have been apartments (I excluded the ‘other’ category from property types).
That’s to be expected in such a densely populated urban area with existing clusters of tall buildings. What about a more rural area of the country?
Wiltshire
As you’d expect for a predominantly rural county, development is concentrated in the main towns and cities, especially Swindon.
The largest of them in terms of number sold is a block of flats called Monument Place, Salisbury.
There was a much more even split in terms of the types of properties sold, with detached houses the most popular, followed by semi-detached, flats and finally terraced houses.
Conclusion
First-time buyers will be hoping construction picks up the pace in 2022 and more new homes come on the market.
Some 15.2% of properties in the Land Registry database sold in 2019 were flats, compared to 17.2% in 2019. It will be interesting if the dynamics of what people are looking for continue to change as Britain (hopefully) emerges from the pandemic.
Attribution statements:
Maps contain HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2021. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Ordnance Survey © Crown copyright and database right 2022