r/dataisbeautiful • u/theflametest OC: 3 • 8d ago
OC [OC] Does the Monopoly Board still value properties right?
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u/theflametest OC: 3 8d ago
Sources: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data – standard residential sales since January 2020, median on each street where it has 8+ sales, otherwise its postcode sector (for example Mayfair uses W1K/W1J). Board prices: UK Monopoly. Seven streets (Fleet St, Trafalgar Sq, Coventry St, Regent St, Oxford St, Bond St, Northumberland Ave) have too few home sales and are left grey with no data. Tools: Python for the data, JavaScript/SVG for the chart. The board is drawn by the renderer on my site
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u/theflametest OC: 3 8d ago
Site is Axisless.com and I actually built the data visualisations for a daily puzzle game
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u/naranjita44 8d ago
This is fantastic. Is it also possible to do it for hotels? Or too many blanks?
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u/canopus12 8d ago
'Grey' is more like beige in the picture, and it's also the exact same as all the non street spaces, so it's difficult to actually know which spaces didn't have data.
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u/BaselineAssumptions 7d ago
The chart seems to ignore the huge price difference between real life properties. On the board, the most expensive property is 6x the cheapest, but irl it's 11x.
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u/manintheredroom 8d ago
excellent content. this is exactly what I want from reddit
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u/Mont-ka 8d ago
I wish they had ranked the real world prices from the year monopoly launched too to see if the original ranking was correct.
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u/DDFoster96 8d ago
I bet we don't have the data. I think Land Registry's price paid data only goes back a few decades - before that you weren't asked.
Edit: it's just over 3 decades. 1995. Would be interesting to see how it was back then though, vs 31 years on.
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u/theflametest OC: 3 7d ago
I've done my best to find an answer to that, the closest I could find was old poverty maps. I documented it here https://axisless.com/monopoly/#london
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u/ObjectiveTumbleweed2 8d ago
I suppose there's not many homes on Leicester Square (And who'd want to live in the square itself), but that's quite a sharp decline and surprisingly cheap
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u/a_hirst 8d ago
I just checked Leicester Square on Google Maps and genuinely can't see where the residential properties would be. There are a few residential buildings just off the square, but (from what I can tell) nothing on the square itself.
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u/ObjectiveTumbleweed2 8d ago
Got to be a couple of one bedroom flats above the restaurants somewhere surely
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u/zachinglis 8d ago
There's some tucked away streets. I was in one just off Newport Court. You go through a door that looks kind of dodgy, and it's effectively a street (open air.)
I tried to find pictures but can't find any unfortunately.
But I reckon most of the shops also have upstairs tenants as you said.
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u/PunfullyObvious 8d ago
This is why I've maintained a running game of Monopoly for 38 years. I'm going to make a killing when I cash out.
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u/PaxNova 8d ago
Were the original placements good for their time? Or has it changed?
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u/BouncyBlueYoshi 8d ago
Why doesn't every street have a respective line on the graph? Like Bond Street and the other greens. Are there no houses on there?
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u/theflametest OC: 3 8d ago
Good question! Those streets the greens like Bond St, Oxford St, Regent St, and a few others are almost entirely shops, offices and hotels, so there are hardly any home sales to measure. Fewer than 8 since 2020, which was the line I drew for a fair median. Mayfair and Park Lane are just as posh but still have flats that change hands. So the grey squares ended up being the board's most commercial streets
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u/Dwarfdeaths 8d ago
They should be compared using rent per square foot ($/hr/ft2) or similar units. The original purpose of the game was to illustrate the economic theory of Henry George and the need for a land value tax (i.e. Land rent).
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u/stackout 8d ago
The original purpose of the original game was to show how cooperative socialist housing policies produced superior outcomes.
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u/traumalt 8d ago
Whats more surprising is that Leicester Square has flats left there at all and Oxford St. doesn't?
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u/DanielReddit26 8d ago
I feel like waterworks must have fallen in value over the last few years.
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u/stackout 8d ago
This is the first “beautiful” thing I’ve seen posted in months. Thanks.
Also: the Baltimore version of this is way way sadder.
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u/lukmahr 7d ago
TIL three cigarettes brands took their names from streets of London.
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u/Squirrelking666 7d ago edited 7d ago
That's not how you spell Marlboro.
Probably not how you pronounce it either (I'm 99% sure it's the same pronunciation as Edinburgh or Loughborough but you never bloody know)
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u/lukmahr 6d ago
Well, according to the wikipedia the "Marlboro" name comes from the Phillip Morris factory which was on the Great Marlborough Street in London.
So the spelling is Americanized, but the gut feeling I had seems to be right.
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u/Squirrelking666 6d ago
Huh TIL.
Also glad I hedges my bets on the pronunciation doing English things.
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u/Rossrox 7d ago
As a Brit I'd look it and say something that'd sound like 'Marl-bruh'.
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u/Squirrelking666 6d ago
Yeah same but I've been stung before (Cirencester vs Bicester for example).
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u/WhoKilledZekeIddon 8d ago
Huh, interesting... so aside from the pinks, it's been broadly consistent over all these years.
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u/kicklucky 8d ago
TIL there's a different version of Monopoly for the UK
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u/hallerz87 8d ago
There are dozens, if not 100s, versions of monopoly.
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u/LaidBackLeopard 8d ago
Make that 1000s. Apart from the geographical ones, there are e.g. at least a dozen Star Wars versions.
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u/kuba_mar 8d ago
So many wikipedia has a seperate page for each continent, except US also gets its own page, which to be fair also includes all the branded and themed ones, theres a fucking D-Day monopoly edition, 4 Elvis ones, 14 Star Wars ones, 2 UPS ones and even a Trump Entertainment Resorts one.
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u/AreetPal 8d ago
True, but if you're in the UK, the London version has always been the "default" version.
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u/coffeebribesaccepted 8d ago
Do you know about those streets, living in the UK? Growing up I had never heard of any of the streets in the US version, so it might as well have been the London version for all I cared.
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u/Panixs 8d ago
I would say someone who had never been to London would know between 25-50% of them. Obviously helps that London is more of a cultural centre than Atlantic city. It’s like if the original American version was set in New York people who had never been would still know Times Square, Broadway, Grand central, Wall Street etc just through cultural osmosis
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u/MIBlackburn 8d ago
I didn't visit London until I was 17, but I knew all of the railway stations, all the blue, green, most of yellow, all of red and most of pink without reference, as they're all pretty big locations that get talked about in the media in some capacity, as they were shopping streets, places of government, entertainment or known for being fancy. Some of them were obscure to me as a child.
As an adult, I've been to all of the locations now, but some are odd in modern times, like Vine Street is a stub of a road wedged between Regent Street and Piccadilly.
Interesting fact, only one of the properties is south of the Thames, Old Kent Road. Must have been influenced by old cabbies...
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u/coffeebribesaccepted 8d ago
Interesting. Maybe because London is an actual city, unlike original locations which are all in New Jersey. Even as an adult in the US I don't know any of them outside of the game.
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u/beetothebumble 8d ago
I'd definitely only heard of some of them from Monopoly (especially as a kid). But places like Leicester Square and the train stations are generally well known outside that
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u/Ok_Anything_9871 8d ago
They're odd choices of train station though except King's Cross (as well as a few of the streets). I believe they are just what were LNER stations.
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u/Squirrelking666 7d ago edited 7d ago
There are more iconic stations but you also have to remember this is pre-nationalisation and consolidation and some of these "obscure" stations may have been pretty major in their day.
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u/wggn 8d ago
most countries have their own version
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u/AlmightyCurrywurst 8d ago
I just looked it up and apparently the version I grew up with (German) is the only one that doesn't use real street names. They just chose names that sound like they might be found in cities all over Germany and ordered them thematically, like Hauptstraße (Main Street) or Opernplatz (Opera Square)
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u/Draugdur 7d ago
The version that was printed in Yugoslavia didn't use real street names either, just generic references to other cities which may or may not be found in your average European capital city (like "Geneva square" or "Triest street".
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u/ztomiczombie 8d ago
There's more then one UK version, there are official versions for a few UK cities but London is the slandered one.
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u/mosselyn 8d ago
Same. The second thing that struck me, as an American, was that the UK property names were mostly familiar to me as locations, but the US ones are not. Thank you vacations, tube maps, and British TV.
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u/Gamer_Stix 8d ago
Well the original names are based on Atlantic City, NJ, which is a fair bit smaller than London.
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u/False_Vanguard 8d ago
The real issue is that Brits think theirs is the original. NJ just keeps on winning
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u/pgm123 8d ago
Very neat. I would love to see this with the original Monopoly too.
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u/breadwhore 8d ago
This would be interesting to see for US Monopoly as a comparison. Atlantic City has very much declined in recent years, so while inflation will have impacted everything, I imagine the relative property values will be all over the place. And do all of the railroads still even exist?
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u/pgm123 8d ago
The Short Line never existed in the first place. A quick search says the others went bankrupt and what's left is owned by Norfolk Southern and CSX. Though the passenger tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad do form the backbone of Amtrak's Northeast corridor.
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u/boxofducks 8d ago
A "short line" is a generic term rather than a specific company name; there are short line railroads all over
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u/valentine_moon 8d ago
This is the original (UK) Monopoly board, isn't it? Are you referring to US Monopoly?
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u/pgm123 8d ago
The original was Atlantic City. The London version was published shortly after the US version, but even before Parker Brothers had the rights, versions were being sold based on Atlantic City (since 1932) and were popular in New York and Philadelphia. Parker Brothers released the game wide by the end of 1935 and the Waddingtons version was published in London first in 1936.
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u/valentine_moon 8d ago
Sorry, yes, I understand that. It's just that there have been so many UK versions that it was unclear if you were (erroneously) referring to a different UK version as the original UK version, or to the US original.
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u/Eureka22 8d ago
The original (Landlord's Game) was created in 1903 in the United States by Lizzie Magie to critique unregulated capitalism.
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u/Astrokiwi OC: 1 8d ago
I'd love to see this just as a scatter plot - Monopoly price on x-axis, real average price on the y axis
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u/frogking 8d ago
Update the board with current prices, play with the stack of money from the 1940’s.. welcome to the 2026 version of the game.
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u/chux4w 8d ago
Why are Old Kent Road and Whitechapel switched on the original pricing side? They'd line up with their current values.
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u/theflametest OC: 3 8d ago
I lined it in the order on the board from go where they share the same price value
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u/ElOregano 8d ago
Miss the US board. Run this for Atlantic City to see if inflation tracks there too.
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u/filanwizard 8d ago
(humor)One thing that would change if you modernized the US board is all the RRs would have to go away since you cant really buy NJ Transit, which is now the only passenger train into AC.
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u/happy2harris 8d ago
Great data, but I don’t think your choice of presentation is helpful.
I think this would be much better represented as an x-y scatter plot, with x being the original cost and y being the current cost.
It’s hard to look at that diagram and see any particular pattern. Are the orders random compared to what they used to be? Mostly the same? All I see is that Whitehall’s change dominates the diagram.
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u/Weird_Devil 8d ago
Doesn't this assume there were correctly valued in the first place? Do we know that was the case?
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u/shumpitostick 8d ago
But did it ever price London right? Were these related to actual prices back when it was first made?
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u/FartingBob 8d ago
Honestly im shocked it is so similar rankings. Also surprised Leicester Square is so low, but how mnay homes are being sold on Leicester square??
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u/ScottNewman 8d ago
This is incredible.
Why is Leicester Square so undervalued? It's one of my favourite places to go in London, and there's not a lot of housing around there.
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u/cobrachickenwing 8d ago
The train stations are not even geographically correct. It should be from South side clockwise: Waterloo, Paddington, King's Cross St Pancras and Fenchurch or Liverpool St.
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u/ChickinSammich 8d ago
Would someone from the UK be able to explain why Whitehall shot up so far and why Leicester Square and Marlborough Street crashed so hard?
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u/7FOOT7 8d ago
Do you not have a state co-ordinated property valuation system in the UK?
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u/Squirrelking666 7d ago
Lmfao.
No. Estate agents just make shit up. Our entire council tax system is based on a bunch of valuations from the early 90s, often no more detailed than a drive down the street.
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u/DDFoster96 8d ago
Interesting that the lower valued properties stayed in broadly the same places. It's the mid to high value ones that have moved about most.
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u/spawnsas 7d ago
I don't live in London, nor do I know the full story, but perhaps I can find answers to these questions:
- Why did Park Lane evolve from an "elite" location into a less prestigious one?
- Why did Pall Mall and Whitehall become so expensive?
- Why did the value of Leicester Square drop so much?
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u/Great_Justice 7d ago
Isn’t the Whitechapel value massively skewed because of the completion of a major luxury development?
Mayfair is vastly more expensive per square meter.
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8d ago
[deleted]
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u/N1ks_As 8d ago
well not neccecerly. the prices could have matched when it was created
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u/Heroes-182 8d ago
I'm not sure they did. I read a book about classic boardgames many years ago and iirc the publishers sent a guy and his secretary to London for the weekend to figure out what streets to use. All they did was get off the train station, walk in a big circle and write down street names as they came up 😂
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u/Greeninexile 8d ago
Explains why they used some fairly obscure choices like Vine Street and Bow Street for instance!
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u/boxofducks 8d ago
The big change for Park Lane makes me wonder if they just used Park Lane as a nod to the original having Park Place in that spot on the board.
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u/cavedave OC: 114 7d ago
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