Half a million quid gets you the median, and the median is doing a lot of work. Detached is nearly nine hundred grand. A flat is a quarter of that. Council tax sits modally at band C, which sounds reasonable until you notice barely one in eight homes sits in the cheaper bands. The household-income arithmetic does not work for most people on most jobs.
A typical home sold in Bosham over the last twelve months went for roughly half a million pounds, across about thirty sales. That is a thin market by any standard, and a thin market in a village this small means each transaction is a sample of one. The split by property type is where the real geometry shows. Detached houses cleared around £900,000. Terraces around £460,000. Semi-detached around £377,000. Flats around £264,000. The gap between a detached house and a flat in Bosham is more than six hundred thousand pounds. There are not many places where the property ladder has rungs that far apart, and there are fewer still where the rungs at the top get bid up by buyers who already own the house they are leaving.
Council tax sits modally at band C, with about one in eight homes falling into the cheapest two bands and the upper bands carrying serious weight in the mix. Roughly one in six dwellings sits in band G or H, which is what happens when a village is half post-war family houses and half Saxon-quay heritage stock with valuations to match. A typical Bosham band D bill runs at around £2,470 a year, with the top band closer to five thousand.
Renting is its own calculation, and the figure is not Bosham's. The typical private rent across the Chichester area runs at about £1,320 a month, which is the local-authority average rather than the village's own number. By bedroom count, a one-bed across the wider area runs at around £940 a month, a two-bed around £1,210, a three-bed around £1,490, and four-or-more at around £2,100. Bosham itself sits at the upper end of those ranges, not the bottom. There is no rental market data published at the village scale, which itself tells you something about how little of the stock actually changes hands as rentals.
The affordability arithmetic is the part where this gets blunt. The typical household income in Bosham runs at roughly £63,000 a year. The typical sale price runs at half a million. That is a price-to-income ratio of about eight to one on the median, and substantially worse on anything detached. The first-time-buyer arithmetic does not really exist here. The second-stepper arithmetic only works if the first step was somewhere considerably cheaper and held its value. The dominant buyer is someone arriving with equity from a house they have already sold, often from a town with the same arithmetic in reverse. The local working-age population is not the buyer pool. The retiring-comfortably population, and the late-career-with-equity population, are.
Houses in Bosham cost what scarcity, conservation-area constraint and Chichester Harbour postcode push them to, which is more than the local wage supports and slightly less than Salcombe charges for a comparable view. The house-price index for the area is down nearly six per cent over the last twelve months, so the half-million figure is what the market is settling at after a soft year, not the peak. It is expensive for what most local incomes can carry. It is what it is for what it is.