Access UK housing data from official sources in R. House prices, individual property transactions, energy performance certificates, planning data, and rental price indices.

The UK publishes some of the richest housing data anywhere in the world. Every residential transaction in England and Wales since 1995 is public. Every Energy Performance Certificate since 2008 is queryable by postcode. Planning applications, brownfield land registers, affordability ratios, rental price indices, and stamp duty receipts are all available at no cost, with long back-series, and at local authority resolution.

The catch is that this data is scattered across roughly ten institutions, each with its own format, access pattern, and quirks:

• HM Land Registry publishes the UK House Price Index via a linked-data SPARQL endpoint plus a REST API, and Price Paid Data as multi-gigabyte bulk CSVs with no header row
• MHCLG's EPC Open Data service requires a free registered API key with HTTP Basic Auth, paginates using search-after tokens, and has 90+ hyphenated fields per record
• planning.data.gov.uk (Digital Land) has a clean REST API with JSON and GeoJSON output
• ONS publishes rental price indices via the Beta API, but affordability ratios only as Excel workbooks with multi-row headers
• DLUHC publishes housing supply data as ODS live tables with hash-based URLs that change on every republication
• HMRC publishes Stamp Duty Land Tax statistics as ODS/XLSX
• VOA publishes private rental market data separately, also as ODS
• Registers of Scotland and NI Land & Property Services hold equivalent data for those jurisdictions in different formats

ukhousing wraps the four stable API-based sources (Land Registry HPI, Land Registry Price Paid, EPC, planning.data.gov.uk) plus ONS PIPR rental prices, and exposes them through a consistent R interface. The flaky Excel/ODS scraping sources are deliberately out of scope: they change format too often to maintain reliably.

install.packages("ukhousing")

# Or install the development version from GitHub
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("charlescoverdale/ukhousing")

All sources are free. EPC requires a free registration for an API key. A SPARQL escape hatch (ukh_sparql()) is provided for queries the dedicated helpers don't cover.

library(ukhousing)

# UK average house prices, monthly
uk <- ukh_hpi("united-kingdom", from = "2020-01-01")
head(uk)
#>         date           region   hpi avg_price pct_change_monthly pct_change_annual
#> 1 2020-01-01   united-kingdom 125.3    232000                0.3              2.1
#> 2 2020-02-01   united-kingdom 125.8    232900                0.4              2.3
#> ...

# All Westminster flats sold in 2024
wm <- ukh_ppd(2024, la = "Westminster", property_type = "flat")
head(wm)

# Energy rating distribution for Westminster
ukh_epc_set_key("you@example.com", "your_api_key")
ukh_epc_summary(la = "E09000033")

# Compare prices across regions
prices <- ukh_hpi_compare(
  c("london", "manchester", "newcastle-upon-tyne"),
  measure = "avg_price",
  from = "2015-01-01"
)
plot(prices$date, prices$london, type = "l", ylim = range(prices[-1], na.rm = TRUE))
lines(prices$date, prices$manchester, col = "red")
lines(prices$date, prices$`newcastle-upon-tyne`, col = "blue")

The Land Registry publishes every residential property sale in England and Wales since 1995. The yearly file is about 150 MB and contains ~900,000 transactions.

# Detached houses sold in Manchester for over GBP 1m during 2024
manchester <- ukh_ppd(
  year = 2024,
  la = "Manchester",
  property_type = "detached"
)
manchester[manchester$price > 1e6, c("date", "postcode", "price", "street")]

# Monthly transaction counts nationally
summary <- ukh_ppd_summary(2024, by = "month")
plot(as.Date(paste0(summary$month, "-01")), summary$n, type = "l")

# Search EPCs
epcs <- ukh_epc_search(postcode = "SW1A 1AA")
table(epcs$current_energy_rating)

# Summary for a whole local authority
ukh_epc_summary(la = "E09000033")
#>   rating count percentage mean_floor_area mean_co2_emissions
#> 1      A    12        0.1            85.3               2.1
#> 2      B  1523       13.2            82.6               3.8
#> ...

# Brownfield land register
bf <- ukh_planning("brownfield-land", limit = 500)

# All available datasets
datasets <- ukh_planning_datasets()

All EPC functions accept type = c("domestic", "non-domestic", "display").

Downloads are cached to tools::R_user_dir("ukhousing", "cache") by default. Subsequent calls are instant. Override the location with options(ukhousing.cache_dir = "/path/to/dir"). Use ukh_clear_cache() to remove all cached files.

The Energy Performance Certificate service requires a free API key. Register at https://epc.opendatacommunities.org/ and then:

ukh_epc_set_key("you@example.com", "your_api_key")

# Or set env vars in .Renviron:
# EPC_EMAIL=you@example.com
# EPC_API_KEY=your_api_key

• UK HPI: 441+ areas, from January 1995 (E&W), 2004 (Scotland), 2005 (Northern Ireland)
• Price Paid Data: every residential sale in England and Wales since 1995 (~28 million records)
• EPC: ~25 million domestic certificates, 2008 onwards (England and Wales)
• Planning: 100+ datasets covering the full England planning system

Report bugs or request features at GitHub Issues.

UK housing, land registry, price paid data, UK HPI, EPC, energy performance certificate, planning, brownfield land, MHCLG, housing data, house prices, property, real estate