espc

OK, after only a minor falling out with our content management system you should now be able to view our latest house price report here. Oh, and (very) belated Happy New Year wishes to one and all.

Yes it has. Previously each property was allocated to one district. So for example, a property had to be defined against Warriston or Trinity. The new site allows these boundaries to merge as districts are not defined exactly and a property can be under multiple districts within reason (we plotted all the districts based on 10 years of data and tried to remove any strange outliers)

Thanks for the feedback. If there is anything you think is missing...let us know. The site has been overhauled in-house so we can change things.

If you are interested in a property, you should submit a note of interest. This means that nothing should happen relating to the sale of the property without you being informed. If you are the first person to place a note of interest on a property, it is relatively common that you have the choice to submit an offer at that point and purchase the property before others get round to submitting a note of interest.

any thoughts on the new site?

Alrighty, inspired by ccc's question re areas where prices have risen and after far too many delays (again, apologies), breakdown of average prices by district for two-bedroom flats in Edinburgh can be found here. Table of figures is linked at the bottom of the article, but if you just want to dive straight in they're here. We briefly had issues with new content on the Beta site only appearing on one out of three servers yesterday but these should be resolved now. If you've any problems viewing either link though feel free to drop us an email at either help@ or marketing@espc.com.

One September House Price Report as promised. http://beta.espc.com/news-events/house-price-reports/2011/september And as I'm writing this I've just realised I need to get the developer types to update the historical house price data file, which I shall scurry off and do just now. In the meantime, the usual table of figures is viewable via the above link if you scroll down to the bottom of the article.

You offer kind words and I repay you with silence. Humblest of apologies to both yourself and the venerable ccc.Just wanted to let you know that the previously promised info on prices broken down by district will indeed be forthcoming either tomorrow or Friday. With predictably stellar timing the stats corner was swamped with a deluge of work from beloved colleagues almost immediately after my PC went kablooey at the end of last week, hence the delay. At the risk of tempting fate, things seem to be on something resembling an even keel again now, so should have said district report as well as the usual monthly figures with you shortly.

I could probably be helpful by answering questions like these as well, rather than just boring everyone with statistical ramblings. The 90% figure I believe relates (or related) to Edinburgh only. 75% relates to Edinburgh, Lothians and Fife. For what it's worth, latest figure I have for Edinburgh itself (source Fortuno Consulting, May 2011) is 88%. Is correct sir. Off-market sales are not entirely uncommon at the upper end of the market and there are also cases where properties are sold within families etc and are thus not advertised. There's also a small number sold via auction and by what the Americans termed FSBO (For Sale By Owner). I should also quickly say the breakdown of prices by districts etc I mentioned a few posts back may be delayed slightly as my PC greeted me with the Black Screen of Death this morning and I've been relegated to using a computer which appears to be powered be a solitary hamster earnestly running round in a wheel. I'm sure he's doing his best, but any attempts to open larger spreadsheets or query our database were greeted with a large degree of whirring, complaints about virtual memory and then lots of messages advising me errors had occurred (none of which I want to send error reports about). And you thought my geometric mean chat was dull! Anyway, I'm reliably informed I'll have something shiny and new (or at least not-hamster-powered) on Monday, so should be available by Wednesday.

Average house price figures are always plain old arithmetic mean. The issue you refer to with compounding is related to describing proportional growth over a number of years. For instance say you had the following average house prices: Year 1: £100,000 Year 2: £105,000 Year 3: £115,500 Year 4: £132,825 Annual growth for those years is 5%, then 10%, then 15%. The arithmetic mean of the annual growth is thus (5% + 10% + 15%)/3 = 10%. But were prices to grow at a consistent 10% pa you'd get the following averages: Year 1: £100,000 Year 2: £110,000 Year 3: £121,000 Year 4: £133,100 The arithmetic mean overstates annual growth. The geometric mean is (1.05 * 1.1 * 1.15) ^ (1/3) = 9.9242% which gives you: Year 1: £100,000 Year 2: £109,924.20 Year 3: £120,833.30 Year 4: £132,825 And thus correctly describes "average" annual growth. For that reason if we're ever talking about the "average" annual growth over a period of several years it would be the geometric mean of said growth which we would refer to, but the "average" house prices themselves will always be arithmetic mean.

Apologies for the late reply. I'd been meaning to do some digging for you re/ what areas had seen price increases but then got caught up working on other things. Some areas are indeed seeing prices rise but as you'd probably expect in the significant majority of cases prices are lower than they were a year ago. Looking at Edinburgh, if you use two-bedroom flats as an example (and taking only districts with at least five or more sales of said properties this year and last) then the average house price is lower this year than last in 76% of districts. Those that have seen prices rise include the likes of Corstorphine, Tollcross and Newhaven. Similarly, for one-bedroom flats, prices are lower this year than last in about 70% of districts. Newington and the West End are amongst those that have seen annual rises. The fact that some districts have seen prices rise is partly just attributable to plain old statistical chance. Once you get down to specific districts and property types within a city you can tend to see some anomalies (both in terms of positive and negative variances) that won't be reflective of long-term trends.That said, and speaking *very* generally, it tends to be areas where prices are at the mid to upper end of the market that have seen higher demand. This strikes me as precisely the sort of thing I should do some more detailed work on and make available to the masses. I fear it will prove interesting only to the sort of tremendously cool people who spend the majority of their lives staring at spreadsheets, but I shall pull some facts and figures together and post them on the new site in the hope of pleasing kindred spirits. Hopefully be done by early next week at the latest and I'll post a link here when done. Sorry again for the late reply.

Excellent point. Will make sure it's added. Thanks for letting us know. That would be more a seasonal fluctuation in this instance. The rolling average in the three months to July has been higher than that for the three months to June every year going back to 2001, but obviously prices haven't always been rising over that period. We tend to focus on annual changes because we don't seasonally adjust our figures and in this case certainly give a more accurate picture of the market. For what it's worth, the skew stemming from the types of properties selling has settled down somewhat over the last year or two (ie the breakdown of properties selling this year is similar to that last year) but there is still a higher proportion of larger properties selling than pre-2008 so it's worth bearing that in mind if you're comparing average figures in recent years with older data. Hope that helps.

Hmm, it appears to be trying to link to somewhere that doesn't exist. There's at least a 70% chance that this is because I don't understand the intricacies of our new CMS but until such a time as this is confirmed I think the mature thing for us all to do is to blame someone else entirely. It *should* be pointing to here. Thanks again, and I'll get the link amended directly.

Well gosh darn it, beaten to linking to our own press release. I'm so ashamed. You also saved me from the 'message board etiquette dilemma' of whether to post it in this thread even though it hadn't been updated for a while, or the more-recently-but-less-often-used 'Edinburgh Spring bounce' one, and for this I thank you. Anyway, as you'll probably notice we're posting these to the beta site as part of the gradual migration to the new website but they should still be accessible from the Market Watch section from Ye Olde Worlde espc.com. As ever, any problems finding anything feel free to ping us an email. Ditto if you have any feedback on the new website.

Apologies, I hadn't seen you had already replied before I posted saying "please email us any feedback". Perhaps we posted at almost the same time or, more likely, I'm just that blind. In any event, consider it fed back. The area isn't currently stored as a field in our own database, but it is in the home report which *is* in our database. We were already looking at trying to pull the valuation from the home report into our database and I would think the principle would be much the same for extracting the floor area. Don't think it'll be feasible to include when the website first goes live simply because of time constraints, but it might be something we can do down the line because I agree that it would be very useful to have. Thanks for the feedback.

Knew I forgot to mention something. For what it's worth the last couple of weeks have seen 200-250 coming onto the market where in March to May it was more in the 250-300 range. Definitely quieter then, but in line with seasonal norms. Usually you'd expect registration volumes to be realtively consistent over the next few weeks before picking up again in late August, though on the flip side sales are also a little lower over the summer holidays so the number of homes on the market isn't likely to change a great deal. If you want to track what's coming on you can click the "New on ESPC" link at the bottom left of the homepage to get what's come on in the last 7 days. Not an entirely robust indicator as it changes every day, but that plus the 'active' total should give you a reasonably good handle on the flows to and from the market. Oh, and I should have said that if you do want to send us feedback on the new site please send it to the email address on the homepage rather than post it here, for we only semi-frequently check these here forums.

Correct indeed! I believe there is currently a small lag between details being updated on our existing site and our new beta site - which you can all play around with and offer feedback on![/shamelessplug]- but that should be in the order of hours rather than days.

Apologies. Our developers are busy getting the new website ready and the house price report going live got lost in the shuffle for a couple of days. I should have noticed myself, but if you have any issues in future feel free to drop an email to help@espc.com and we'll chase it up for you and send you a PDF copy in the meantime. The 'Historical House Price' spreadsheet in the House Price Report section has been updated with figures for the three month rolling period going all the way back to 2000 if you want to see this month's figures in historical context. Any problems, feel free to get in touch.

Our preference is for the market to be at a point where those that wish to move onto, up or down the property ladder are able to do so....rather than where the prices are.

apologies for the late reply..do not get the chance to join you fellows often. Limelight is available as an enhancement to the marketing of a property that is paid for. In addition, if a client has their home on the market for over 6 months, they do qualify for a free limelight listing when their property is reregistered with ESPC. From June to Feb we had forecast just under 1,000 Limelight options would be purchased (i.e. excluding those that qualify for the free option). The actual number is nearer 1,500.

We no longer include the properties that we receive from GSPC in the total that is displayed on the homepage. This is the reason for the figure being far lower.

Thank you for pointing this out. We had picked up on it and as soon as our hand cranked content management system publishes the page again, it will be amended in the para you mentioned and in the bullet lists. Looking forward to June when we can turn off the current version of espc.com and start working with the shiny new content management system. We are looking to create a small group of external users who might like to have access first to the new version of espc.com as part of a public beta test. Anyone interested? Please contact marketing@espc.com.

we would have loved a bigger story too....oh well...maybe next month.

Sorry for the late reply. We tend to put the monthly figures out a little after the quarterly ones as releasing both sets in one report appeared to create a bit of confusion for some people in the past, particularly if they showed conflicting trends. This year we'll be looking to start having the monthly reports cover a three-month rolling period which will allow the more in depth level of analysis you get in the current quarterly reports. The average house price figure for the individual month will still be made available though for those who wish to track such things. Anyway to answer your question, December's report should be up on the site later this week, but in the meantime the average house price in Edinburgh for December 2010 was £211,747. This was up from £206,442 in Dec 09, but down from £215,173 in November this year. Hope that helps.

Aaand that should be it sorted. Regular table can be found at: http://www.espc.com/EspcPageMedia/MarketWatch/Q42010/2010%20Q4_Table.pdf Or you can get to it via the main report, whichever sails your dinghy. Apologies again for the error.