All Land Registry’s historic price paid data of over 18 million sales is now available to download for free as part of its open data programme.

Giving access to a dataset going back to 1995, containing in excess of 400 million data items, developers and businesses can now use one of the world’s largest property datasets of residential sales in England and Wales for commercial and non commercial purposes. It is also used to calculate Land Registry’s House Price Index.

The data being released today includes records of sales at full market value lodged for registration since January 1995. Collectively this represents almost 18 years worth of valuable information on the country’s housing market. Since the first tranche of data was released in June this year, more than 114,000 files have been downloaded.

Eddie Davies, Land Registry’s director of commercial and customer strategy, said: “Today’s release takes us one step nearer towards our vision of being a world leader of property data management and part of the open data landscape.

“The potential for use and reuse of this data is enormous and we hope that providing it in a number of different formats makes it more accessible and able to be shared more easily.”

The data released shows that the cheapest property ranged from £5,200 in 1995 to £8,000 in 2013 and the most expensive from £3.75 million in 1995 to £29.35 million in 2013. In 1995 there were just over 105,000 new build sales; in 2013 the figure is around 45,700. The only ‘property type’ sales to have increased since 1995 are flats and maisonettes.