Renting in the UK: Modelling the Market
Welcome to the 2nd article of the series in which we help all you DataTrekers to uncover new ways of gaining the edge over your competitors. Today we will be diving into the UK property rental market.
Data Used
For this project we used the Lookup Domestic dataset (part of our DoordaLookup range of products) on our data platform. The data features over 27 millions addresses in England and Wales, with up to 43 data point collected from each address and combined transaction value of properties over £2.8 trillion.
Lookup Domestic is an aggregated, refined and cleaned data-set which we collected from multiple sources, including Land Registry, Valuation Office Agency and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s.
Tool Used
- Google BigQuery
- Google Data Studio
All visualisations and analysis were made using Google Data Studio, which pulls data directly from our data stored on BigQuery.
Who’s the Biggest Landlord in England and Wales?
Using the data on commercial owner’s name and type, we created a pie chart to helps us analyse the composition of commercial owners:
Currently, private companies makes up for the biggest group of commercial owner type, equivalent to 63.8% of total property, with usages ranging from investment, rental, to business facilities such as offices and factories. On the other hand, local authorities make up for 6.3% of total properties. Sequentially, more properties are rented from private landlord (15.81% of total properties) than councils (8.85% of total properties). It is also interesting to note that property rented from private landlord tend to be more expensive.
Taking it further, the 10 biggest properties owners in the UK consists of a mixture of council and private landlords. The biggest private owner in the UK is Wallace Estates Limited, a property investment company with over 20,000 properties. Its main lines of business includes renting, buying and selling of real estates. While the biggest council owner is the city council of Bristol, which owns 9715 properties.
Comparing the Most and Least Expensive Location to Rent
Using the data on rental prices, we have identified the most and least expensive location to rent in the United Kingdom.
Which of the 2 above locations are more expensive to rent? If your answer is the picture on the left, you are correct!
Picture on the left is taken from the City of Westminster, the most expensive location to rent (or possibly to buy) in England and Wales, with average rental price of nearly £5,000 per month, while its highest value can go up to over £13,000.
On the other hand, picture on the right is taken from Kingston upon Hull, the least expensive location to rent in England and Wales, with an average rental price of £425.83 per month, while the highest value in the area is only £434.
This supports our analysis in previous article: A New Way to Find High Net-Worth Individuals? where we found that Households in Westminster has among the highest expenditure in London.
Calculating Price/m²
It may seem that the above findings doesn't compare the true value between properties in Westminster and Hull, since it only looks at the rental price of the property on a whole, without taking into account the size of the property. What if the reason for a higher rental price is purely due to a larger property floor area? Therefore, to enable a fair comparison, we compared the price per square metre of properties.
To do so, we must introduce another metric from the dataset, Average Floor Area, which provides information regarding the size of property.
The above tables compare the highest average rental price per square metre, which is calculated by dividing average rental price by the floor area of the property. The finding demonstrates that properties in Westminster is OVERWHELMINGLY MORE EXPENSIVE than Hull!
NOTE: If you want to compare the individual properties between the area, make sure you also take into account the type of property! Otherwise your result can be erroneous if you compare the price of a flat to a house.
Conclusion
It is relatively simple to visualise rental data in a pie or bar chart, but the real power/insight can be obtained when combining property information and rental prices with other geographical data such as property transactions, households demographics or expenditure.
At Doorda we have mapped all our statistical data to a postcode level, which means that you can have more granular insights in your geographical analysis. Our next article will be on occupancy data, demonstrating how we can create value by understanding business occupancy.
DOORDA’S RENTAL DATA ALLOW YOU TO ANALYSIS AND SEGMENT OVER 27 MILLIONS PROPERTIES ON UP TO 43 FACTORS INCLUDING PROPERTY TYPE, TENURE, COUNCIL TAX BANDS AND MANY MORE.
