Houses in Bristol cost about £355,000 for the typical sale, which sounds like one number and behaves like five. Flats sit near £265,000. Terraces climb to about £385,000. Detached houses ask around £600,000. The average is a polite fiction stretched across a very unequal city.
Roughly four thousand two hundred homes changed hands over the past year, so this is a busy market rather than a thin one. The £355,000 median is the middle of everything, with terraces and semis doing most of the volume at around £385,000 and £375,000, flats anchoring the bottom near £265,000, and detached houses out on their own at about £600,000. The gap between a flat and a detached house here is the difference between getting into Bristol and getting comfortable in it.
Council tax softens the blow a little. The most common band in the city is B, and six in ten homes sit in the two cheapest bands, so for all the talk of a pricey city, the annual bill tends to land lower than the sale prices lead you to expect. The Georgian terrace and the postwar semi are not taxed the same, and the banding remembers that.
Renting is its own conversation. Across the wider Bristol authority the typical private rent runs to about £1,880 a month, a whole-city figure that flattens every postcode into one number. Broken down, a one-bed averages around £1,230, a two-bed about £1,545, a three-bed near £1,760, and anything with four bedrooms or more pushes past £2,550. None of that is cheap, and all of it has been heading one way.
Set that against a median household income of about £57,000 and the sums get tight. The typical price lands at more than six times what a typical household brings in before tax, which is the kind of multiple that turns a two-income couple into a mortgage application and a one-income buyer into a spectator. Bristol is not the most expensive city in the country, but it stopped being an affordable one a while ago, and the incomes have not kept pace with the terraces.
So what do houses cost in Bristol? Enough to hurt, not enough to laugh at. It is dear without being ridiculous, and for a city this busy and this liked, that lands the price a little above the middle of the pack rather than out at the punishing end.