Houses in Arundel cost about £408,000 as the typical sale. That is the median across roughly fifty transactions over the last twelve months. Detached is nearly a million. Terraced is closer to half. The castle keeps the postcode expensive and the buyers keep the postcode small.
The split by type is where the picture gets useful. Detached houses cleared roughly £875,000 over the last twelve months across around nine sales. Terraces went for about £460,000 across close to twenty sales, which is the biggest single slice of what actually changed hands. Semis sat at around £385,000 across fifteen sales. Flats came in at around £235,000 across ten sales, which is the cheapest way into the postcode and a decent chunk of what moves here. The total across all types is a market of about fifty completed sales in a year, which is not a big pool: buyers here wait for the right door, and sellers here wait for the right offer, and neither side is in a hurry.
Council tax puts the modal home in band C, which is where a lot of the terraces and smaller semis sit. Only about one home in seven falls into bands A or B, which is the polite way of saying the cheap end of the tax picture is a thin slice, not a big one. Most of the town sits from band C upward, and the listed frontages on the higher streets sit higher still.
Renting works out at about £1,220 a month as the typical private rent across the Arun area, which is a local-authority figure pooling Arundel with Littlehampton, Bognor Regis and the rural parishes. Arundel itself sits above that pooled average rather than below it. By bedrooms, the area picture runs at roughly £840 a month for a one-bed, about £1,130 for a two-bed, close to £1,380 for a three-bed, and nearly £2,000 for four bedrooms or more. Studios sit around £625 and rooms in shared houses land near £525. Arundel's own listed cottages push the two- and three-bed numbers higher than the pooled average suggests.
Affordability is where the postcard meets the payslip. The typical household here brings in about £58,000 a year on total income before tax. The typical sale is roughly £408,000. That is a price-to-income multiple of around seven, which sits above where mortgage arithmetic usually starts to work without a substantial deposit, existing equity, or a second earner carrying serious weight. In practice, the buyers turning up are downsizers with money out of somewhere bigger, professional-class couples with two incomes and London-priced deposits, and retirees converting a lifetime's worth of somewhere-else into a cottage with a Grade II front door. First-time buyers on a single local income do the sums, look at the flats at £235,000, and either stretch or move to Ford.
The verdict on what houses cost here is 2 out of 5. Arundel is not cheap for what it is, and the market is thin enough that when the right thing appears the price does not soften for the person turning up. You pay for the castle, the cathedral, the conservation area and the fact that the town has decided not to build very much more of itself. If the sums work, they work. If they do not, they will not, because nobody selling here needs to make them.