Understanding the Spatial and Temporal Impact of the Coronavirus 2019 Disease (COVID-19) on House Prices in England and Wales
This study investigates how annual house price appreciation has been affected during 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic. It uses a dataset-fusion approach, combining price-paid data with COVID-19 cases, population and average garden size figures, aggregated at a county level.
Using visualizations to inform the process, new features are extracted to be modelled using regression techniques. A geographically weighted regression (GWR) model was found to be most accurate (R2 of 0.73), confirming the importance of the spatial attributes of the data.
The results demonstrated clear temporal trends, identifying stark periods of low appreciation during lockdown, and a recovery after the August Government stimulus measures. The trends were inconsistent with prior periods and correlate with the additional datasets added. Spatially, clustering resulted in four distinct groups of counties that experienced the pandemic differently in terms of house price appreciation, giving insight into the preference changes of buyers and identifying counties in need of further support.
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Data Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/price-paid-data-downloads