As if we didn’t know it London is made up of many different smaller markets and just as there isn’t ‘a national housing market’ it’s not really fair to judge Mayfair along with The Old Kent Road.
I have clients who want to live in N1 but not in Nw1, happy to look in Sw11 but not Sw8 – but then there are more obvious reasons for this second example.
So, how can we judge the performance of one area with another? Well, the Land Registry will help allowing you to compare one borough with another or indeed with a different county.
The monthly index of asking prices produced by Rightmove will give you an idea of just how ambitious sellers in one particular area are.
Savills and Knight Frank both produce Prime Central London indices although you will need to cross Savills palm to get the detail. Lonres.com, Hometrack and Rightmove’s Automated Valuation Model (AVM) all produce detailed information for estate agents so members of the public will need to chat up their agent to get access to these. You can get a free guide to the ‘value’ of your house using the ‘estimator’ from FindaProperty.com or Zoopla. The data each holds is impressive and will help you work out a rough price per square foot for a property or area – something that’s helpful for both potential sellers and for those confused about what to offer.
John D Wood publish house price indices, rents and yield graphs on their web site which give you a lot of high quality data and it’s helpfully broken down into different areas and sectors of the market. As you can see for the graph below, whilst not surprising to most Monopoly players, the performance of Mayfair, Fulham & Notting Hill has been tracked in detail using sold prices (rather than asking prices) and adding other agents sold data to supplement their records. It’s impressive (and free!) stuff! “Simples!”
