Delineating the spatio‐temporal pattern of house price variation by local authority in England: 2009 to 2016

Housing is a major source of inequality in England, but most house price variation studies are conducted at national or regional scale or, conversely, in a specific city. Detailed research at sub-regional level is missing, especially for the period after the global financial crisis. This research addresses this gap with an analysis of variation at local authority level across England between 2009 and 2016. A novel house price per square meter (HPM) dataset is used to control for property size effects in transaction price variation. The effects of two spatial levels (local authority (LA)—and Middle Layer Super Output) together with three time categorizations (quarterly, half-yearly, and yearly) is systematically explored using multilevel models. Results show that the time categorization effects are essentially identical and extremely small, in comparison with the LA effects. As annual effects provide the best model fit, LA annual house price trajectories are explored further. Overall higher HPM LAs grew faster over the 8-year period than lower HPM LAs. [Corrections made on 05 May 2022, after first online publication: '80-year' in the previous sentence has been corrected to '8-year' in this version.] More locally the spatial pattern shows some variation in the overall pattern, with some LAs near London or Bristol exhibiting higher relative percentage HPM increases with a relatively lower initial HPM compared with their neighbors