House Price Indexand Key Statistics

The e.surv E&W HPI is based on every residential property transaction in England and Wales, and is designed to provide a true measure of house price inflation.

In 2003, Acadata pioneered use of Land Registry (LR) data for a mainstream house price index, launched by the Financial Times as the FTHPI. In 2010, LSL Property Services plc assumed the preparation costs from Acadata, rebranding the index as the LSL Property Services/Acadata HPI (now e.surv HPI (England and Wales)) and Your Move Acadata Scotland HPI (now Walker Fraser Steele HPI (Scotland)). The Principality HPI for Wales was also launched in 2017.

Whilst the Land Registry (LR) is the only source of the final prices at which residential property is sold (including properties bought with cash- which are excluded from mortgage-based data), the problem exists that only c.38% of sales are reported in a timely fashion to the LR. These “emerging” data are insufficient to be definitive, which meant that LR data were long regarded as too “untimely” to be useful. Acadata resolved this problem using a custom-built “index of indices” methodology developed by Dr Stephen Satchell at the University of Cambridge and Dr George Christodoulakis, then at City University. The model provides the emerging % Monthly change to the average house price for both the current month and the month ahead. These are used in our e.surv E&W HPI initial release issued shortly after each month end.