Sales & Pricing

Sales and pricing statistics describe the homes that traded in an area, the value of that activity and the typical price of usable floor space. They answer different questions and should be read together rather than used interchangeably.

Sales Volume

Sales, Sales Count and Sales Volume refer to the number of eligible recorded residential transactions in the selected area, property type and rolling period. They count transactions, not necessarily distinct homes: a property can sell more than once.

The figures concern recorded sales, not asking prices, listings, reservations, mortgage approvals or transactions still awaiting registration. Recent periods remain subject to revision.

Property-type rows separate flats, terraced houses, semi-detached houses and detached houses. The flat category follows the dataset's flat/maisonette classification. All Types aggregates the eligible categories shown; it is not a census of the area's housing stock.

Trading Shares and Traded Value

The two shares can differ substantially. A type with relatively few sales can account for a larger share of traded value if its homes are more expensive.

Nominal means pounds at the time of the transactions, without removing inflation. Traded value measures transaction activity, not the value of all homes in the authority or the amount of mortgage lending. A rise can reflect more sales, higher prices, a different mix of homes, or a combination of these.

Value per square kilometre uses land area. It provides a measure of the geographical concentration of trading value. It is not the price of land and is not interchangeable with price per square metre of a home's floor space.

Estimated Price per Square Metre

This is an estimate of typical transaction pricing per square metre of floor area for the selected property type and area. It makes markets with different typical home sizes easier to compare than headline sale prices alone.

It relies on the sales for which usable floor-area evidence is available. It is not a literal median of every recorded sale, a mean asking price, or a complete observed measure of every home. Sales without usable area evidence can still contribute to sales counts and traded value.

Multiplying the area estimate by a particular property's floor area does not produce a property-specific valuation. Location within the authority, condition, tenure and specification can all distinguish an individual home from the segment benchmark.

National Price Bands

Price Bands place local sales into five nationally defined transaction-price groups, from Band 1, the lowest, to Band 5, the highest. The reference market is England and Wales.

The bands represent approximately equal fifths of eligible national transactions by price. The 20% reference line on the sales chart is a national comparison, not a target for the local authority. A high-priced authority may have many more than 20% of its sales in Band 5. Price ties can also prevent perfectly equal national groups.

Each observation has its own cash boundaries. They are not fixed price brackets, local quintiles or five equal groups of existing housing stock. A lower boundary is inclusive and an upper boundary is exclusive; a sale exactly on a dividing threshold belongs to the higher band.

The chart's Sales view shows the distribution of transaction counts. Value shows the distribution of traded pounds. A band can dominate the value chart without containing most sales. The table's Share column remains a count-based measure.

Flat Share has a different denominator from the band's Share: it describes the mix inside that band, not the percentage of all local transactions that are flats. For historical comparisons, read the period-specific price ranges rather than assuming that a band number always means the same cash price.

Reading the History

Each chart point represents the stated rolling observation. Year on Year compares it with the equivalent endpoint a year earlier. It does not mean the change between two individual months' sales.

Use price and sales history together: higher prices alongside fewer transactions describe a different market from rising prices alongside increasing activity. Neither pattern, on its own, establishes a change in the value of every home. See Market Momentum.