I came across Alasdair Rae‘s cool ‘nearest x things’ map a few weeks ago and decided to apply it to England’s house price data. Check out my attempt in this interactive app:

https://kpunch899.github.io/aspiring-home-owner/   

The tool allows you to have a quick look at the average house prices (based on sale price of homes over 2024-2025 to date) in a neighbourhood (defined by postcode districts / 4-digit postcodes in this case). The tool also shows you the nearest three neighbourhoods where average prices are a certain percentage lower than your chosen location. This helps the aspiring home owner (or a data fiend!) learn the average house price in their desired location and also the next best alternatives that might fit their budget better.
 
Click on About the tool button for some (easy) instructions.
 
Some interesting insights from when I played around with the tool:

1. Regional disparities – The variations in average house prices across London (e.g., central London versus outskirts) are often higher than those in other regions, where prices are more uniform within cities;

2. Price drops for outer zones – Postcode districts in London Zones 3 onwards show up as next best alternatives to employment hotspots in the city (Westminster, Camden, City of London for example) around the 30% – 50% discount mark; and

3. New possibilities – Small budget adjustments can introduce new neighbourhoods nearby and serve as hopeful reminders that we may not be required to move far from our desired neighbourhoods after all.
 
Some notes on and limitations of this tool:

• Limitations of Price Paid data mean that the tool only works for England and Wales postcode districts.
• Data used here are based on 2024 to 2025 (to date) sales. Average prices in some locations may therefore be biased due to small samples, i.e., a very small number of homes sold in the postcode district over this time period may skew the average price (such as in City of London).
• The tool does not display average prices by beds, type of property (detached, semi-detached, flat etc.) or age (new or old) and so is a simplistic representation of the average house prices.
• The tool does not capture social housing due to exclusion in Price Paid data.

Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2021. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.