About three hundred grand gets you in. A typical sale runs around £304,000. A terrace lands near £314,000. A flat goes for roughly £155,000. Cheap end of the south coast, expensive end of Paulsgrove.
Over the last twelve months, 134 properties changed hands, which is enough sales to give an honest picture rather than a marketing brochure. The median came in at around £304,000. Split by type, a flat runs about £155,000 off 23 sales, a terrace about £314,000 off 58 sales, a semi-detached about £328,000 off 44 sales, and a detached about £575,000 off the nine that traded all year. Detached houses are rare here because the streets are mostly post-war semis and pre-war terraces, which is what happens when a place was built for workers commuting across the bridge rather than for officers wanting a coach house. The wider housing-price index for the area is down a couple of per cent over the last twelve months, which is the kind of correction that mostly hurts vendors who bought at the 2022 peak and is mostly invisible to anyone else.
Council tax leans cheap. The most common band is C, which is mid-range, but more than half the dwellings sit in bands A or B, with roughly one in five in band A on its own. Some of that distribution is Cosham itself, and some of it is Paulsgrove and Wymering, which sit inside the same ward and pull the cheap end of the curve. Either way, the annual bill on a typical home here lands meaningfully below what the same house would cost in Drayton.
Renting is the area-wide story rather than the neighbourhood's own. The typical private rent across the Portsmouth area runs at about £1,360 a month. A one-bed comes in around £900, a two-bed around £1,130, a three-bed around £1,350, and a four-bed-or-larger at around £1,960. Cosham sits inside that envelope rather than at the top of it. A flat above the high street prices like a flat above any high street on the mainland fringe of Portsmouth, which is to say it costs less than the same flat would on Portsea Island and a long way less than it would in Southsea.
A typical household here earns around £58,500. A £304,000 house is a little over five times that income, which is the kind of multiple that needs two earners and a deposit but is still inside the range a mortgage broker will look at without sucking their teeth. It is a stretch, not a fantasy. A flat at £155,000 is under three times income, which is the genuinely affordable end of the market and the reason there are still people in their twenties buying here rather than renting until retirement.
For what you get, the prices are about right. Above average on the Portsmouth scale, below average on the southern-suburb scale, and the gap between a Cosham flat and a Drayton semi is the real pricing logic of the whole postcode.