About £310,000 buys the typical Fareham house. Around 580 sold in the last twelve months. Council tax sits mid-table. Rent is climbing faster than wages. That is roughly five times the typical local household income, which is what a south-coast commuter town within reach of two cities now costs.
Split by type, the picture spreads out. A flat goes for around £157,500. A terrace runs around £280,000. A semi-detached comes in around £325,000. A detached clears £445,000. About 580 properties changed hands over the last twelve months, which is the kind of volume that gives a price tag credibility rather than coincidence. Semi-detacheds did the heaviest lifting with close to 200 transactions, terraces and detacheds were neck-and-neck behind that, and flats made up a little over a hundred. The middle of the market is where Fareham lives, and the middle of the market is where most of its working buyers shop.
On council tax, the modal band is C, which puts the typical household squarely in the middle of the national grid. Roughly three in ten dwellings fall into the lower A or B brackets, so the cheaper end of the borough is meaningfully represented rather than vestigial. There is a genuinely cheap tier here for buyers who want to be in the area without paying the area's top-half rates, which is more than several neighbouring towns can say.
On rent, the typical private rent across the Fareham area runs to about £1,210 a month. That is a local-authority figure rather than the town's own, and it covers everything from a one-bed flat to a four-bed detached. By bedroom, a one-bed runs around £850 a month, a two-bed about £1,100, a three-bed about £1,370, and anything with four or more bedrooms approaches £2,000. The gap between renting a two-bed and owning the cheapest flat is smaller than you think, which is why a lot of Fareham renters are doing the maths and starting to lose patience with the maths.
Set against a typical household income of about £62,000, the median Fareham house at £310,000 works out at roughly five times income. That is a stretch on a single salary, workable on two, and entirely normal for a south-coast market town within commuter reach of Portsmouth and Southampton. The town sits well above the cheaper end of Hampshire and well below the Surrey commuter belt, which is the price bracket the location and the building stock have earned. Buyers who arrive from further north often expect Fareham to be cheaper than it is; buyers arriving from further east often expect it to be more expensive than it is. Both are looking at the same number from different sides of the same M27 junction.
Houses here cost what a settled south-coast commuter town with a station and a working town centre costs. Fair value if you need what Fareham provides, expensive if you don't.