Quite a few updates over the past week, with as many suggestions taken on board as was realistically possible. As always, the priority remains the same: reproducible, accurate data first, and it has to be fast.

With the database now north of 100 GB, individual tables exceeding 30 million rows, and creeping towards a billion individual data points, keeping things responsive is… non-trivial. At this scale, every additional chart is basically an argument with physics.

Most of the wait-time issues are now largely handled via an army of background cache workers that pre-compute things before you ask for them. The end result is that almost everything on the site now loads close to instantly, which is generally preferable to staring at a spinner questioning your life choices.  As the most frequent data is made available once per month, I can afford to cache it all and only cache again when there is new data to offer you.

EPC

Mostly speed improvements here. EPC now has its own section and also integrates into individual property searches where a valid certificate exists. Worst case, finding an EPC takes around 980 ms, depending on your connection, slightly slower on mobile, as this data can’t be fully cached without doing something truly unpleasant.

Property Dashboard

Now fully cached. Therefore fast.

As much information as the Land Registry realistically provides is summarised here. It’s not rich data, but everything it does contain is now surfaced in one place without unnecessary waiting.

Property Area Search

A new section, and now fully cached.

This allows Land Registry data to be viewed by area, from smallest to largest:

• Locality
• Town / City
• District
• County

You can find the search here. It is quicker than before, which is the main point.

Individual Property Search

Tidied up and reorganised based on suggestions. It was already fast, but now it should at least look like it knows what it’s doing.

Prime, Ultra Prime and Outer Prime

These pages have been expanded to include everything usable from the Land Registry data, including price breakdowns by property type:

• Flats
• Detached
• Semi-detached
• Terraced

Additional charts now show:

• Existing vs new-build sales
• Leasehold vs freehold sales

The Top 3 Sales chart is now properly interactive, you can hover over each point and see full details, including the postcode, should you feel the urge to investigate further.

Repossessions

Yes, fine, I got too clever and built an over-engineered dashboard that nobody liked. Clearly my fault.

This has now been rebuilt and simplified.

There’s a clean summary view with high-level data, plus a search box that lets you drill down into Local Authority level figures. That’s the lowest level the data supports, so no, you can’t go smaller.

General Tidying

• The House Price Index (HPI) section has been cleaned up with simpler, more readable charts covering the UK, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
• The new-build comparison has been simplified to show total new-build vs existing sales, plus whether each increased or decreased year-on-year. No unnecessary decoration.

Not really relevant, but I’ll say it anyway

I’ve also built a new admin dashboard that lets me update all market-stress indicators quickly as soon as new data drops. Nobody will ever see this, but it makes my life easier, which matters.

That’s the last week covered.

More updates/changes are coming next week.