About £415,000 for the average Brighton home, and the average Brighton home is a flat with a bay window and a story about the damp. Terraces run to roughly £480,000. Detacheds head toward £600,000. Roughly 2,100 homes changed hands last year. That is Clifton money delivered by the seaside instead of by the M4.
The typical sale over the past year came in at £415,000 across 2,137 transactions, which is enough movement to say the market is real rather than notional. Prices have softened over the past twelve months, down about 3% overall and closer to 5% on flats. Terraces do most of the heavy lifting on the median at about £480,000, semi-detacheds sit close behind at £450,000, and detacheds run to roughly £600,000. Flats do the ballast at about £283,000, and are the reason the town-wide median looks reasonable in a listing that will not tell you which type you are getting. The gap between a Brighton flat and a Brighton detached is the difference between a coastal deposit and a coastal semi in every other Sussex postcode.
Council tax is band C at the median, which is the middle of the range and reflects the age and size of most Brighton homes. Over four in ten homes sit in bands A or B, which is the contribution of the flat stock to the tax base. Nobody is on the top band by accident, and nobody in the bottom band feels they have won a lottery.
Renting sits at about £1,820 a month for the typical private rent across the Brighton and Hove area. A one-bed runs at roughly £1,200, a two-bed at £1,530, a three-bed at £1,810, and anything with four bedrooms or more clears £2,500. The rent-to-buy gap has not closed in a decade, which is why the private rental sector at three in ten homes is still doing so much of the housing work.
The typical household earns roughly £57,000 a year before tax. Divide the median sale by the median income and you get somewhere north of seven times earnings, which is a stretch by any lending standard and impossible without a deposit that already exists somewhere else. First-time buyers who arrive with only a salary and no equity from a previous sale end up renting for longer than they planned, or moving to Worthing and pretending it was the plan all along. The couples who make the arithmetic work either have two professional incomes or have already sold something further inland to get here. The buyers who make it easy have equity from a London flat that quadrupled in the previous decade, which is not most people, and not a repeatable route.
Houses cost what houses cost when a coastal city runs out of space and stays that way. The trend is down, not up, and the market is soft enough that the person telling you to move quickly wants a commission, not a favour.