Cheam costs about half a million pounds. The typical sale lands at around £550,000. A semi costs well above that. A flat comes in at a little over half of it. Nearly half the homes have three bedrooms. This is a suburb that has decided what a family needs and set the price to match.
In the year to May 2026 the Land Registry recorded 186 sales in Cheam, with a median price of about £551,000. The 70 semi-detached houses that sold had a median of around £627,500. The 74 terraces came in at about £553,500, and the 38 flats at about £325,000. Only 4 detached houses changed hands, at a median of £645,000. Four sales is too few to call a market, so that figure tells you very little. The extra for a semi buys one fewer neighbour and the side return that the loft conversion will eventually need.
The official house price index for the area shows prices up about 1% in the twelve months to May 2026, which is barely any movement at all. Flats went the other way, down about 1% over the same year. Over five years the index is up about 11%. Anyone hoping for a slump has been watching the wrong suburb, and anyone hoping for a boom has too.
Band D is the most common council-tax band in Cheam, and only about 5% of homes are in bands A or B. A band D home in Sutton pays about £2,379 a year. Band D is the band councils use as their benchmark, so Cheam's typical house is the one the whole tax system was built around.
Renting costs about £1,550 a month on average across Sutton as of April 2026, up about 3% on a year earlier. That is the Office for National Statistics' mean for the whole borough, so it describes Sutton generally and gives no reading for Cheam's own streets. By size, the Sutton averages are about £1,230 for one bedroom, £1,545 for two, £1,885 for three and £2,480 for four or more. Figures for studios and single rooms aren't published.
Average gross household income in Cheam, before tax and modelled by the Office for National Statistics, was about £83,000 in the financial year to March 2023. That is a healthy income, and a median sale of £551,000 still stretches it. Most of the people here bought on earlier prices, and the newcomers are paying for that.
Among the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate's floor area, which was about 83% of them, the median price was about £5,960 per square metre, for a typical home of about 91 square metres. Get the floor area from the energy certificate and compare it with the size in the particulars. An estate agent's floor plan has a way of measuring the garage as living space.
The Census in 2021 found that about 46% of Cheam's homes have three bedrooms and 25% have four or more. Two-bedroom homes make up about 21% and one-bedroom homes about 9%. If you're looking for a three-bed, you have more choice here than almost anything else in the market. You also have more competition for it.
Prices in Cheam are middling for this corner of London. They aren't cheap, they aren't a scandal, and they've been flat for a year.