About £310,000, and the average is doing a lot of covering up. A flat here goes for around £205,000. A detached house goes for around £460,000. Both of those are Bournemouth, sometimes on the same walk to the shops. The seaside-town price you have in your head is only true if you buy the seaside-town property, and most people end up buying something else.
The Land Registry's twelve months to late May 2026 recorded just under 2,000 sales, with the typical one at around £310,000. Split by type: flats about £205,000 across 821 sales, terraces around £285,000 across 179, semis about £340,000 across 262, and detached houses about £460,000 across 732. Flats and detached houses between them account for the overwhelming bulk of what changes hands, which is the town in miniature. Two markets, barely touching, filed under one postcode.
On direction, the published house-price index for the area put the average at about £315,000 in May 2026, down roughly 1% over the preceding twelve months and up about 8% across five years. Flats specifically were down about 3% over the year. Neither of those is a collapse and neither is a boom. A 1% move is the market shifting in its chair, not getting up.
Council tax is one of the genuinely cheap things here. Band C is the most common band, and roughly 41% of dwellings sit in bands A or B, which is a low-banded town by any measure. The band D bill runs to about £2,440 a year, band A about £1,620, band H about £4,870. If you are coming from a higher-banded part of the country, that is real money back every month.
Renting is the expensive side of the same coin. Typical private rent across the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole area runs to about £1,400 a month, a mean from the official private rents index rather than a median of what is advertised, and up around 4% over the year to April 2026. By size that is roughly £920 for a one-bed, £1,170 for a two-bed, £1,460 for a three-bed and about £2,090 for four or more. By type, flats sit near £1,080 and detached houses near £1,880.
Against income, the picture is tighter than the headline price suggests. Modelled gross household income for the area, before tax, was about £51,000 in the financial year to March 2023, with the net figure nearer £38,000. A £310,000 median against a £51,000 gross household income is not the south-east squeeze, but it is not a bargain either. It is the number that quietly explains why so much of the stock is flats and why so many of those flats are rented out rather than lived in by their owners.
Per square metre, the market runs at roughly £4,070, on a typical measured home of about 94 square metres. That covers the sales matched to an energy certificate's floor area, which is around 64% of them, so it describes most of the market rather than all of it. Worth knowing before you accept an agent's line about a flat being compact but efficient.
The bedroom mix, from the 2021 census, is what you would expect from a town of flats: about 20% of households in one bedroom, 35% in two, 28% in three and 17% in four or more. Over half of all households live in two bedrooms or fewer.
For a coastal town on the south coast with schools this good and council tax this low, the pricing is comfortably better than fair without being a steal. The catch is that the affordable half of Bournemouth is almost entirely flats, and the moment you want a garden the number stops being friendly.