The government measures to reduce the spread of Covid-19 effectively paused the housing market in Northern Ireland between 23 March 2020 and 15 June 2020. As a result of these measures Land & Property Services (LPS) decided to suspend the publication of the quarterly NI House Price Index for Q2 (Apr – Jun) 2020. LPS have continued to process any transactions received via HMRC and monitored the volume of transactions during the period since 23 March 2020.
Although the number of transactions received was reduced by approximately two thirds of the usual volume of transactions, the transactions are still representative of the property market as they are not skewed towards one property type, location or socio-demographic characteristic. As a result the model used to predict the average price and index value is robust.
Details of the checks run on the model to determine reliability can be viewed below.
Analysis of NI HPI Regression Model during Covid-19 Pandemic Q2 2020