Prices and indices
Registration lag
The weeks to months between a sale completing and HM Land Registry registering it, which makes the most recent months of any sold-price series incomplete.
Also called: provisional period, HMLR lag, incomplete months.
Definition
Registration lag, as the data uses it
A sale completes on one day and is registered when the buyer's conveyancer lodges the application and HM Land Registry processes it. Most registrations arrive within two months; some take much longer. So the month that has just ended shows a fraction of its eventual sales, the month before shows more, and a series read naively looks as if the market has collapsed at the right-hand edge.
MarketCode handles this in three ways. Volume series return a provisional_from date and the guidance is to read the trend only up to it. The rankings drop the most recent months by default (lag_months), because otherwise the newest month would rank registration lag rather than liquidity. And the index carries a last_settled_period: points after it are forecasts, flagged as such, with bands.
Tools
Tools that return it
Monthly transaction volume
market_volume_series()Monthly transaction VOLUME for a postcode district, postcode area or
Rank areas on a market metric
market_ranking()Rank areas against each other on a market metric — one row per area at the latest period. Defaults to turnover_rate, which is sales as a share of the stock that could have sold: the liquidity measure, as opposed to transaction count, which measures market size.
House price index series
market_index_series()The published house-price INDEX for one postcode district or local authority: the level per month (base period = 100), the forecast tail flagged, and provenance saying how the index was built.
See also
Related terms
- Price Paid Data: HM Land Registry's record of every registered residential sale in England and Wales since 1995: price, date, address, type, tenure and whether it was a standard market sale.
- Forecast tail: The points at the end of an index series that fall after the last settled month, projected rather than measured, flagged is_forecast with a lower and upper band.
FAQ
Questions about registration lag
What does Registration lag mean?
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The weeks to months between a sale completing and HM Land Registry registering it, which makes the most recent months of any sold-price series incomplete.
Which MarketCode tools return registration lag?
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Monthly transaction volume, Rank areas on a market metric, House price index series. Each runs as an MCP tool in Claude, ChatGPT, Codex and Cursor and as a REST endpoint with an API key, at the same price.
Is HMLR lag the same thing?
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Yes. provisional period, HMLR lag, incomplete months are other names for what this entry defines; MarketCode uses "Registration lag" in its tool descriptions and responses.
See it on a real address.
Thirty minutes, your property or area, every figure sourced.