Roughly the price of being one stop short of Chichester. The typical sale over the last twelve months landed at about £393,000. Detached houses ran to £580,000. Flats cleared at £183,000. Not Chichester money, but you can hear it from here.
About 158 homes changed hands in the last twelve months, which is a slow trickle for a town of thirteen thousand and a sign of how rarely anything actually moves. The headline median sits at around £393,000. Split that by type and the picture sharpens. Detached houses ran to about £580,000. Semi-detached came in at about £390,000. Terraced houses at about £350,000. Flats at about £183,000, which is the lowest entry point in the town and the one most first-time buyers end up looking at, with sixteen of them trading over the year.
Council tax tells the same story from a different angle. Band C is the most common, which is the middle of the road and the most boring possible answer to give about a council tax band. About one in six homes sits in the cheaper A or B brackets, which is the share you'd expect for a town with a tail of small flats and post-war stock around the edges. The properties sitting closest to the water show up in the higher bands and pay for the view.
Renting runs at about £1,130 a month, which is the typical private rent across the Havant area (Emsworth itself is not separately measured, so this is the closest honest number for the place). One-bedroom places run to about £840, two-beds to about £1,070, three-beds to about £1,330, and four-bed-plus to about £1,870. Anything detached, or close enough to the water to smell it at low tide, sits at the upper end of those spreads.
Household income in the area runs to about £61,000, which makes the typical house sell for more than six times what the typical household earns. That is a stretch by the affordability measures bankers used to apply, and an ordinary Tuesday by the measures the south coast currently runs on. It locks in the owner-occupiers who got in early, and it locks out the household renting next door who arrived after them.
Houses cost above-average money for a Havant-borough postcode and below-average money for a Chichester-harbour view, which is exactly the trade Emsworth has been offering for years. You pay for the water, the conservation lines on the map, and the slow rate at which anyone here ever sells.