Two numbers I would like to see

[andrewducker]

1) Average age of first-time home buyers as a graph covering the last 50 years.
2) Average monthly mortgage repayment over a similar time period - adjusted for inflation.  Because this would adjust (somewhat) for house prices going up while interest rates are low.

Between them these would tell us something about the affordability of housing over a long period.

Comments

[andrewducker]

If there's not enough data to be meaningful then why do you think they're not going up?

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Good point. I'm not seeing them go up; I think the data can be made to mean anything.

[andrewducker]

I can see your point. Housing is something that's really hard to judge as a market - the houses that were being sold at the top of the market are not necessarily the same kind of houses as are being sold now.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

The land registries methodology is sound (similarly the FT) - they use sales of the same house as they have a complete list of sales. You need lots of data points so that wear and tear and homeowner improvement cancel each other out, plus the effect of auctions (depressed price) and new houses (no previous data).

The nationwide / halifax indexes only include houses that require mortgages so exclude lots of investment buys, and that cash buyers generally get better prices. However, they do lead the LR/FT index by a few months so general trends are picked up there first.

Nationwide / Halifax currently differ over the last 12 months by a huge margin - NW is up 6%ish, H only 2%ish. A 2% rise is roughly matching the rate of inflation so isn't a rise at all in real terms.

[andrewducker]

Which is why those "mortgage payments/income" ratios are so handy :->