ONS and Land Registry change house price measure

The new official House Price Index, combining data from the Office for National Statistics and Land Registry, shows a notable reduction in the average house price in the region.

The new measure uses a wider data set and generates the price of the average house rather than the average price for all houses in a given area. Unlike the former ONS index, the new HPI takes into account all bought properties rather than only those with a mortgage and reduces the weighting of properties with an extremely high value.

The national average house price under this new index is far lower than previously thought, with the averages dropping 28.4% from £292,000 to £209,000 for the UK, and 26.8% in England from £307,000 to £224,731.

In the North West, under the new HPI, the average house price for April was £145,149, a 22% drop from the old ONS figure for March, £185,000. Though still significantly short of the national average, under the new HPI the North West average house price is now 64.6% of the England average, up from 60.2% under the former ONS index.