Brexit referendum and the housing market

One of my recent tasks at work was to analyse the Brexit referendum results alongside the UK housing market. Happily, everything except the rental data (which came from Zoopla) was publicly available. The property and rental prices took some wrangling, because the Land Registry doesn’t report by Local Authority district, and that was the unit the Electoral Commission used. LA districts aren’t a default geographic category in Tableau (version 9.3.5), but the official blog had recently run a post on how to map non-standard geographies.

The final result was a map (below) and a press release. This is another housing market analysis that gained a lot of media coverage, among others by International Business Times, Business Insider, and Mortgage Introducer.

I wanted to dig deeper into how the voting patterns related to the housing market, so I put together the following bar charts:

Visualised this way, it’s fairly clear that the areas with the highest house prices and capital gains (annual average over the previous six years) were also the most likely to vote Remain. The picture is harder to read once you sort by rental yield, where the voting pattern more or less disappears.

The scatter plots (with overlaid trend lines) make the positive correlation easier to see: as the share of Remain voters rises, so do median house price (2016), median rental price (2016), and capital gains (annual, 2010–2016). The relationship breaks down for rental yield, where there doesn’t seem to be any link at all.

The Guardian and BBC conducted similar analyses comparing voting patterns to demographic variables.