About £365,000 buys the typical Barnham house. A detached runs closer to £491,000. A semi around £350,000. A flat lands at about £157,000. Below Arundel, above Bognor Regis, priced exactly where the train tracks suggest.
The market turned over about 156 properties in the last twelve months, which is a steady village tick rather than a frenzy. Detached houses did the volume work, with 64 sales clearing a median around £491,000. Semis came in at around £350,000 across 51 deals. Terraces sat at about £300,000 across 31 sales. Flats, of which only ten changed hands, went for around £157,000. The detached-to-flat ratio is more than three to one, which tells you what people are actually buying here. Not bolt-holes. Family-sized lumps of brick with a garden, bought to live in rather than to flip.
Council tax sits mostly in Band C, the modal band across the village. Only around one in seven properties falls into the cheap Band A or B, so the council-tax bill is not the bargain that pulls you in. Whatever the house cost, the tax comes in middle-of-the-road afterwards.
The typical private rent across the Arun area runs to about £1,220 a month. That figure covers Barnham as part of the wider local-authority area rather than as a village-specific number, but it is the right ballpark. A one-bed across the area lands at about £840 a month. A two-bed around £1,130. A three-bed around £1,380. A four-bed or larger jumps to just under £2,000. Supply at the family-house end is thin because eight in ten village households are owner-occupiers, and most landlords would rather cash out at £350,000 for the semi than collect £1,380 a month for it. The arithmetic of being a Barnham landlord does not reward patience.
On affordability the maths is honest. The median household income in Barnham runs to about £58,000. The median house runs at £365,000. That is more than six times income, which is a stretch on a single salary and workable for a couple with two earners and a deposit. For first-time buyers under thirty without family help, the £157,000 flat is the realistic entry point, and the £840-a-month one-bed rental is the bridge. For everyone else, the village runs on the unspoken assumption that you brought equity in from somewhere: a London flat sold during lockdown, a Surrey downsize, or a parent's gift that quietly funded the deposit. Not a problem if that is you. A problem if it is not.
Houses here cost what they should cost: enough to keep the village settled and selective, not enough to make it a destination. Decent depth, decent variation by type, decent value if you have the equity to start with.