Your user-friendly guide to the RICS house price survey

Understanding the RICS house price survey

(As requested by an EAT reader)

Three children and their pet dog, Acadametrics, go into a sweet shop.

Tom wants Lovehearts, Laura wants chocolate drops and Richard wants some humbugs.

Acadametrics, who has mild learning difficulties through inter-breeding which is blamed on the Land Registry, likes fudge.

The shopkeeper, Mr Candy, makes a great fuss of Acadametrics, who is awfully thick but likes being patted, all the same.

Mr Candy gets out his scales and starts weighing out the fudge. “I don’t understand this,” he exclaims. “It’s not doing what it says on the tin! I have no idea what to charge you. I think you could be paying too much.”

The children decide to put the fudge back on the shelf. Poor Acadametrics! No fudge this week.

Mr Candy next weighs out the Lovehearts.

“Goodness me!” he says, his forehead furrowed. “Just look! You’ve got 1,002 Lovehearts to the quarter of a pound. That’s an increase of 5% on last month.”

Tom thinks about it.

“Would that be a nationwide increase?” he asks Mr Candy.

Mr Candy says yes. He weighs them again, just to be sure. And do you know? This time there are 1,009 Lovehearts to the quarter.

And that makes Tom very happy indeed. Right move, he says!

Indeed, he resolves not to eat his Lovehearts at all but to sell them as soon as possible in the playground for at least twice the amount: “And then I’ll be able to upsize to half a pound of Lovehearts,” he tells a smiling Mr Candy.

Mr Candy, who doesn’t have the heart to tell Tom that Lovehearts don’t always sell for their asking price, next weighs out Laura’s chocolate drops.

Oops!

“My scales are never wrong,” says Mr Candy, with a frown. “But I’m only getting 95 chocolate drops to the quarter. Last month, I was getting 203.”

Laura bursts into tears: “Crummy old chocolate drops,” she says. “I expect they’re made in Taiwan.”

Mr Candy shakes his head: “Oh no,” he says, inspecting the label. “They’re from Halifax.”

Laura takes her sweets, but she’s not very happy. Her pocket money has been stretched to the limit and yet she’s got fewer chocolate drops than last week. How she wishes she’d chosen Lovehearts!

Now it’s time for Richard’s humbugs.

Mr Candy takes down the jar and pours some on to the scales. The scales wobble violently for several minutes and some humbugs fall out on to the counter.

“Wow,” says Richard, “it’s like something out of the Beano!”

Mr Candy laughs. “That sounds very old-fashioned,” he says. But when he looks at the jar, he sees the sweets were made in 1953 to a secret recipe unaltered since 1748, and whose ingredients are known only to an enclave of 15 elderly men.

When he looks even closer, he sees there are some strange instructions in a mysterious code.

“Well,” says Mr Candy, scratching his head, “What on earth are we to make of this?”

Richard gets irritated: “Get a move on, Mr Candy. I’ve got to go and see to my stamp collection! These are very reliable humbugs – people at the Bank of England eat them. Enough of your tiresome quibbles! The whole economy depends on them. These humbugs get favourable reviews everywhere. The whole world trusts these humbugs.”

But Mr Candy is transfixed: what on earth is all this stuff about fewer humbugs rather than more humbugs?

At last, Mr Candy makes a move.

He throws a factor of 267 humbugs off the scales and on to the floor, where a grateful Acadametrics licks them up exactly as though they were fudge.

Mr Candy then gives Richard the net balance.

“Understood?” says Mr Candy.

“Not really,” says Richard. “I’m not quite sure what I’ve got.”

“Quite so,” says Mr Candy.