Tightness is the ratio of search demand to listed supply in a travel-to-work area, the housing analogue of the vacancy-to-unemployment ratio in a labour market. A tight area has many searchers chasing few listings. This exhibit asks how unevenly tightness is spread across the country, and how that pattern has moved.
The first view tracks the Theil index of tightness across areas, by year and tenure. Sale-market inequality dipped to a trough in 2021, when the pandemic pressed on housing everywhere at once, then surged to a 2025 high as the map pulled apart again; rental inequality rose more persistently. The second view shows where the shift happened: choose a region to trace its demand-weighted average tightness against the others. Before the pandemic London and the South East were the tightest markets, but they fell back faster afterwards, so by 2025 several northern regions are tighter than the South. That reordering is the divergence behind the rising inequality. Values are travel-to-work-area estimates; England is the reliable canvas.