ONS Price Index of Private Rents — ukh

Downloads the ONS Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR), UK: monthly price statistics. PIPR replaced the Index of Private Housing Rental Prices in 2024 and is published monthly from January 2015 for the UK, its countries, the English regions and local authorities (around 350 areas in all), including average rents in pounds.

Usage

ukh_pipr(property = "all", refresh = FALSE)

Source

Office for National Statistics, Price Index of Private Rents, UK: monthly price statistics. Official statistics in development. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/datasets/priceindexofprivaterentsukmonthlypricestatistics

Arguments

property: Which series to return: "all" (default, all private rented property), a bedroom count ("one bed", "two bed", "three bed", "four or more bed") or a property type ("detached", "semidetached", "terraced", "flat maisonette").
refresh: Logical. Re-download even if cached? Default FALSE.

Value

A data frame with columns date (first of the month), gss_code, region (area name), parent_region (the region or country an area belongs to; NA for the UK and its countries), index (January 2023 = 100), monthly_change_pct, annual_change_pct and rental_price_gbp (average monthly rent, rounded to the nearest pound). Values the ONS marks as unavailable or not applicable are NA. Requires the readxl package.

Details

The ONS stopped updating the rental index on its Beta API at January 2024, so this function reads the monthly workbook from the ONS website instead. The cached copy is refreshed once it is more than getOption("ukhousing.cache_max_age", 7) days old.

Examples

# \donttest{
op <- options(ukhousing.cache_dir = tempdir())
try({
  rents <- ukh_pipr()
  tail(rents[rents$region == "United Kingdom", ])
  flats <- ukh_pipr(property = "flat maisonette")
})
#> ℹ Downloading ONS Price Index of Private Rents...
#> ℹ Loading PIPR from cache. Use `refresh = TRUE` to re-download.
options(op)
# }