Confirmed: Derry is the happiest place in the North to buy a house

The study was conducted by the Online Mortgage Advisor using geotagging technology, to determine where the people were based, and AI technology to determine how happy new home-owners were in the pictures they posted on Instagram.

AI facial recognition technology was used on over 300,000 instagram pictures that were posted with hashtags that related to having bought a new home such as #homeowner, #firsttimehomebuyer, and #newhome. The technology determined the emotions felt by the face or faces in the picture and give a score to each emotion, the highest scoring emotion was then determined to be the dominant one. AI facial recognition software is able to pick up anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutral.

The study was conducted throughout the UK and Derry came out second overall, behind Blackpool, with new home-owners reportedly 70% happier than the UK average. Belfast came second in the north and Carickfergus came second, with happiness scores of 40% and 31% respectively, while Hollywood came in last in the north, with a happiness score of 52% below the national average.

Low-cost housing is said to be the reason behind Derry’s high score as Derry has some of the lowest house prices out of all the areas in the study, which can be found here