Over the past three decades the UK has seen housing affordability plummet. The shortage of housing supply, and critically, the misallocation of where homes are built, are central to this issue. 

Using data on over 20 billion housing searches from UK’s most popular housing platform together with the full history of rental and sales listings from 2019–2024, we define two new measures of excess housing demand that can help guide the location of new homes in Great Britain: 

1. Housing gap: the difference between the number of people searching for homes and the number of available properties in an area. It reflects how many home-seekers are affected by a shortage.

2. Housing tightness: the ratio of demand to supply. It reflects how intensely affected home-seekers compete for each available property.

You can find:

• Underlying research report (joint with Nikhil Datta)

• Mapping tool: WhereToBuild 

• Project website with 350 customised Local Authority reports

If you're a policy maker or stakeholder interested in learning more, please reach out (amrita.kulka@warwick.ac.uk) or sign up for future updates!