I’m getting deeper and deeper into the weeds of finding a neighbourhood to live. I’ve sorted out the schools now, I believe – the only piece of analysis I will add is the admissions data from this year’s admissions (how many applicants per place and catchment areas). But I have peeled the onion a bit on house prices.
What I realised, trawling through for-sale ads, is that a 3-bedroom house in Plumstead is a very different thing compared to a 3-bedroom house in Bermondsey, and a 3-bedroom house in Dulwich, Wimbledon, etc. Surprisingly none of the property websites let you filter or search by floorspace. I did find one that lists floorspace for most properties – OnTheMarket – and am in the process of scraping the data for all the areas under consideration.
It’s pretty stark – here are my results so far. Sample size is how many ads were listed with that postcode at the time of scraping, ‘Avg asking price per…’ is missing the last bit, square metre, and the column titled 100 shows the average price of a house with 100 sq m of floorspace (the approximate size of the house we are living in now).
So you can see that a square metre of floorspace is cheapest in SE9 and most expensive in SW19, where it’s covered in stardust, I’m led to believe. And for a similar sized house you might pay more than double depending on the area you’re looking in.
This is very helpful because a) it lets us cull some postcodes from the running (it’s possible that there could be an amazingly, improbably cheap house available in Wimbledon, but it’s going to be a waste of time to look for it) and b) because when we find a house we like, we can check how it compares to the average price-per-square-metre in that area.
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