Friday lunchtime lecture: Empty homes and house prices: is there a relationship?

House prices are a popular topic of conversation in the UK. Less popular is the rate the prices are increasing. The UK average house price has increased 30% since the 2008 crash, and London house prices have gone up 75%, according to the Land Registry House price index from September 2008 to September 2017. In London, price increases are often blamed on empty homes bought as investments by rich foreigners. Areas such as Cornwall and the Lake District blame price increases on holiday homes bought by rich Londoners. However, there is very little data supporting or against these beliefs. Jonathan Bourne spent a year sending Freedom of Information requests to gather a dataset from over 100 local authorities. He was interested in data on 'low use properties', which are domestic properties that contain no full-time resident. The data covers 22 million people and 330,000 low-use properties. The data shows a clear relationship between price and low-use properties. In this talk, Jonathan will discuss his findings, showing how London is affected in the same way as the rest of the country and that building more houses may not help solve the problem of high prices. He will also describe how he got the data and what he learned about the Freedom of Information Act. Jonathan Bourne is a data scientist who previously worked in the energy industry and is currently studying for a PhD in Complex Networks at University College London. When he has the time, he blogs on SomeSquaredError.