Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Mapping London's Million Pound Houses


There is only one thing the British like talking about more than the weather and that is the price of their houses. That is why the whole of the British cartography industry is now dedicated to mapping property values in the UK.

For example, Which magazine has released a new interactive map showing all properties that have sold for more than £1 million. The Million Pound Property Sales Map plots all million pound houses sold in London or the south-east between 1995 and 2015.


However property in the UK isn't just expensive in the south-east of the UK. There are also million pound houses elsewhere in the country. The Million Pound map and the Two Million Pound map shows the locations of expensive properties throughout the UK.

Both these UK maps show the locations of houses sold in England and Wales using data from Hamptons International and the Land Registry. The Million Pound map shows properties which sold for above £1m in 2013. The Two Million Pound map shows properties which sold for above £2 million since 1995.


One of the reasons property prices in the UK are so high is because of the number of buildings owned by offshore companies. Satirical magazine Private Eye has created an interactive map which shows the amount of English & Welsh land that has been bought by these offshore companies.

Selling England by the Offshore Pound uses Land Registry data to plot all land parcels registered in the name of an offshore company between 2005 and July 2014. So, if you want to know why there are so many million pound houses in the UK, then you might want to ask your local friendly tax dodging parasite why their properties are registered overseas.


If all these UK property maps haven't put you off the idea of owning a home in the UK then you should check out this Guardian newspaper map. This map helps you find an area where you can afford to buy a property in England and Wales based on your annual income. Unfortunately you probably can't afford to buy a house in most of the country.

If you earn the national average wage in England or Wales then you can not afford to buy a house in 93% of the country. That's right you can't afford to a buy even the smallest, worst kept properties, almost anywhere in the entire country. Don't worry though, if you do well and manage to raise you income to twice the national average salary then you just might be able to afford a house in one of the country's poorest neighborhoods

Unaffordable Country is a choropleth map which colours postcode areas based on the affordability of properties in the area. Type in your average salary and the map will show you all the areas where you can afford to live - or, as is more likely, all the places in the country where you can't afford to live.

For example, where I live, in one of the poorest boroughs in the whole country, you would need to earn around three times the national average salary to be able to afford a house. In other words you would need to be in the top 5% of the country's wage earners to be able to afford to live in one of the country's poorest boroughs.

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