When assessing home insurance premiums, insurers naturally take into account the crime rate in the area where the house is located – and now new research has suggested there may actually be a link between house prices and burglary rates.
Churchill Insurance has suggested there is a direct correlation between the rise in house prices and the fall in burglary rates across the country – highlighting that the counties experiencing the steepest property prices are also experiencing the biggest decrease in reported burglaries.
This may be surprising, or unsurprising depending on your perspective. In some respects it makes sense that poorer areas suffer higher rates of crime; but on the flipside it could be argued that houses with higher values – and therefore those more likely to have higher content values – would be a greater target for burglars.
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“It is interesting to see a correlation between the price of houses and the level of crime in an area,” said Michael Scott, the head of Churchill home insurance.
“However, while it is encouraging to see that the number of burglaries across England and Wales has fallen in the past five years, the fact remains that the average property has a one in 67 chance of being burgled.”
The statistics revealed that across the 10 regions in England and Wales, house prices rose from an average of £199,493 in 2011 to £274,228 last year – a leap of nearly £75,000, or 37%. Over the same timeframe meanwhile, the number of burglaries has fallen by over a quarter (28%), dropping from over 500,000 five years ago to 360,000 in 2016 – a fall of 140,000.
In London, where house prices have risen from £311,210 in 2011 to £523,968 last year, burglary rates have dropped by 64%. So in 2011, London was experiencing around 264 burglaries a day compared with 95 every day, last year.
Five-year house price and burglary rate changes in regions across England and Wales
