Tightness is the ratio of search demand to listed supply (θ = enquiries ÷ listings) for each travel-to-work area. The map shows where the market is tight or slack in a chosen year, or the significant hot- and cold-spot clusters of tightness (local Moran's I, conditional-permutation significance at p ≤ 0.05). The panel beside it lists the tightest and slackest areas in that year; the two charts below track how unequal and how spatially clustered tightness has become over time. Tightness diverges before prices do, which is why it works as an early indicator. The enquiry data cover England densely but Scotland and Wales much more thinly, so θ is most dependable for England; the Scottish clusters in particular rest on sparser data and should be read with caution. Figures shown start in 2018, the point from which enquirer locations (and hence θ) are reliably measured.
Hover an area for its value. In the tightness view, darker = more demand per listing (a tighter market). Grey = no reliable data (mainly Scotland and Wales).
The Theil index is an entropy measure of inequality across areas: zero would mean every travel-to-work area is equally tight, and higher values mean demand-to-supply pressure is concentrated in fewer places. After holding roughly flat through the late 2010s it climbs steeply from about 2021, close to doubling by 2025. Tightness has become markedly more unevenly spread, with a few markets tightening sharply while others slacken.
Global Moran's I measures whether tight areas sit next to other tight areas: each area's tightness is compared with the average of its neighbours (Queen contiguity), on a scale from −1 (a checkerboard) through 0 (no pattern) to +1 (strong clustering), with significance from 999 conditional permutations. It stays firmly positive and significant throughout (around 0.5), so tightness is always strongly regionally clustered; unlike the dispersion index it is fairly stable, so the recent divergence has deepened existing regional blocs rather than scattered them.
The highlighted point on each chart is the selected year; both series run 2018–2025 for the chosen market. The map is the spatial snapshot for that year.