Land Registry ... Land Fantasy!

I went to the UK Land Registry site to check a couple of things. I foubd

A) they had got the buying price of my house wrong by a factor of 55%. Two other houses in my street were equally wrongly recorded.
B) i downloaded house prices for Calderdale for all types of property for the period Jan 1995 to Dec 2012 and found the prices all correlated with each other PERFECTLY.

I wrote to them on both counts!

UPDATE

Here is their response to the perfect correlation issue:

Dear Mr Williamson,

Thank you for your query.

There are natural limitations, due to sample size, in the provision of local indices. Unfortunately it is not possible to create a reliable quality adjusted monthly price index at a level of granularity much beyond London Borough level. Indeed, the Land Registry HPI is the only index that provides quality adjusted price appreciation data beyond the ten Government Office Regions. Land Registry are able to achieve this because of Land Registry's comprehensive datasets and the application of the repeat-sales regression method.

The household type breakdown on London Borough/County/Regional level is provided to enable reference to absolute levels rather than to explore differential movements. The absolute values simply represents an indexation of the initial geometric mean (a type of average) price by the appropriate London Borough/County/Regional index because a more granular index would lack sufficient sample size to provide meaningful results.

I hope this helps answer your question as to why, as you rightly noted, the appreciation rates are identical for all types of properties within the granular indices.

Kind Regards

CK

I have to say, i got very little from that response!


DW