The price went up. The house got cheaper.
63% of the famous fivefold rise in house prices since 1995 is the pound shrinking, not housing
Nine of Greater Manchester's ten boroughs recorded their highest ever house prices last year. Measured in money that means the same thing from one year to the next, nine of the ten are worth less than they were in 2021. Both sentences come from the same 29,388,009 registered sales. This piece counts thirty years of Land Registry prices twice — once in cash, once in constant pounds — and shows that roughly 63% of the famous fivefold rise since 1995 is the currency getting smaller, not housing getting dearer.
- The median home in England and Wales sold for £54,950 in 1995 and £295,000 in 2025 — a rise of 5.37 times. Put both figures in the same money and the rise is 2.63 times. Nothing was smoothed or modelled: it is the same 29,388,009 sales, counted twice.
- Between 2021 and 2025 the nominal series rose 6.9% and ended at a record. The real series fell 13.4%, and fell in every one of those four years without interruption. The real peak was 2021 — a fact the nominal series does not contain anywhere.
- Nine of Greater Manchester's ten boroughs set a nominal record and nine of the ten sit below their real-terms peak. Only Bolton is at its real peak, up 2.1% on 2021, and it manages that from the second-cheapest position in the conurbation.
- The correction lands on our own past work too: a previously published Wigan series showed a 78% rise from 2010 to 2025. In constant pounds it is 16%. Nearly four fifths of the apparent rise over fifteen years was the pound.
- A stated limitation, not a footnote: CPIH includes owner occupiers' housing costs, so deflating house prices by it is not a fully independent correction. The medians are also not composition-adjusted — a median cannot separate "prices fell" from "cheaper homes sold".
Extended findings
The full column develops four threads the abstract can only point at.
The four years nobody reported. The nominal and real series do not merely differ in size; between 2021 and 2025 they differ in direction. Real medians run £353,567 to £306,022, falling every single year, while the cash figures climb to a record. A reader given only the left-hand column has not been given a smaller version of the truth. They have been given the opposite sign. Each sale is deflated individually, before any median is taken, and 100.0000% of in-scope sales matched a month with a published CPIH figure — the join is on calendar month, exact, with no interpolation and nothing dropped.
Where the correction bites hardest, and where our own reading of it failed. Manchester is down 8.9% in real terms since 2021, Salford 8.0%, Stockport 7.3%, while Oldham is down 0.2% and Bolton is up. That looks like a clean gradient — expensive boroughs losing most — and the column spends a section explaining why we would not publish it as one. Trafford is the most expensive borough in Greater Manchester and lost 0.7%, less than Wigan, the cheapest; the two orderings correlate at −0.32. Nine boroughs going backwards is a finding. Which nine went backwards fastest is, on this evidence, a hypothesis, and it is reported as one. Two of the three deepest falls are in the city core, where the stock added since 2010 is overwhelmingly flats — a composition story as much as a price one, and not something a median can separate.
The rate shock arrived twice, about two years apart. The quoted two-year fix averaged 1.45% in 2021 and 5.31% in 2023. The effective rate households were actually paying averaged 2.06% in 2021 and only 2.96% in 2023 — and was still climbing in 2025, at 3.88%. The shock people read about in 2022 and the shock that reached household budgets are not the same event, and they do not share a date.
What it does to our own numbers. A previously published series had Wigan’s median rising 78% between 2010 and 2025. In constant pounds it went from £177,281 to £205,684 — up 16%. The number was not wrong; it was measuring the pound. A pound spent in the 1990s is worth £2.06 in today’s money and a pound spent in the 2020s £1.16, which is why the further back a comparison reaches, the more of it is currency.
None of this makes housing cheap. Two and a half times, in real terms, in a generation, is the whole problem in one figure. It just means the number worth being angry about is a different one from the number in the headline.
The full document carries the complete method, both fact-check tables tracing every figure to its aggregate, and the nine caveats in full — including the base-month choice, CPIH revisions, late registrations, and the fact that present-day boundaries are applied to historical sales.
Use the button below to request the full document — it arrives through your in-app messages from the site administrator.