The £500,000 stamp duty blackspot
709 sales are missing from the £5,000 just above £500,000 — 39% fewer than the market either side of it predicts.
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Offrly Research — UK housing market findings from HM Land Registry data
Findings from the complete HM Land Registry Price Paid record, published every quarter with the underlying data attached. Every figure comes from a query you can re-run. Where the data doesn't support a story, we say so.
Current release: 2026Q1 · 635,379 arm's-length residential sales, 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026.
The new-build premium is mostly a mirage
The new-build premium is +25.0% on the headline numbers and +10.4% comparing like with like — and in 26% of the country new builds sell for less than second-hand.
Leasehold houses are a North West story
Nationally 6.1% of houses sell leasehold. In Oldham it is 63.5%.
What we tested and couldn't publish
- Fastest-heating and fastest-cooling postcode districts. Not published: our working copy of the Price Paid record starts in January 2025, and a twelve-month year-on-year comparison needs April 2024 onward. Even with that history, any window spanning March 2025 compares a market rushing to beat a stamp duty deadline — completions ran at roughly double the normal rate that month — against a normal one, so we would not trust the result without separating the two effects first.
- Where £300,000 buys the most house, by floor area. Not published: Price Paid Data records no floor area, so a price per square foot cannot be derived from it. The median-price-by-type version holds up — £300,000 clears the median detached house in only 79 of 626 towns with enough sales to report — but that is a supporting figure, not a finding.
- Streets and sectors with the widest price spread. Not published: the raw cheapest-to-dearest ratio is driven entirely by single outliers — it surfaces a £1 sale and a £540,000,000 one inside the residential category. The outlier-resistant version produces a ranking with no pattern in it. A null result is still a result.
Licence and reuse
Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Analysis by Offrly. You are free to reproduce these figures and charts with attribution to Offrly and HM Land Registry. Each story links the CSV behind it — please check our working. If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it and say what changed.