Houses on Hayling Island cost about £356,000 on the median, which is what you pay to be on an island the train forgot. Detached homes change hands at around £450,000. Flats sell for about £167,500. Two hundred and thirty-odd properties moved in the last twelve months. Not Sandbanks. Not Canvey Island. Somewhere a quieter Bognor would aim at, if Bognor could afford to.
The headline figure of about £356,000 conceals the split that does the actual work. Detached houses made up roughly half of last year's sales and ran at around £450,000. Semi-detached at about £327,000. Terraced, the rarer item, at £305,000. Flats, the only category under £200,000, at £167,500. Total depth was 233 sales across the year. That is enough to keep the agents busy and enough to make every figure above an actual transaction average rather than the wishful asking-price arithmetic the boards out front prefer.
Council tax bands cluster modally at C, with about a quarter of dwellings sitting at band A or B. That distribution is what happens when the dominant stock is post-war detached, semi-detached and bungalow rather than Victorian terrace or Georgian villa. The cheapest bills sit in a bracket Sandbanks would find amusing, and the most expensive sit nowhere near what equivalent square footage commands at the aspirational end of the coast.
The rent picture is reported through the Havant area average, which comes in at about £1,130 a month and stands in for any Hayling-specific number the data does not publish on its own. A one-bed runs at around £837. A two-bed at around £1,070. A three-bed at around £1,330. A four-bed or larger at around £1,870. The Havant figure folds in mainland Leigh Park and Havant town itself, both of which sit below the island, which means a Hayling-only number sits above the headline rather than below it. The buy-to-let yields people sometimes quote on Hayling postcodes are calculated on a rent figure they do not actually have.
The median household income on the island sits at around £49,500. A typical sale at £356,000 is about seven times that figure. The ratio reads tighter than it is, until the demographic that buys here gets read alongside the price. A median age of fifty-seven on the island means most buyers are not starting from a graduate salary and a five-year savings plan. They are downsizing from somewhere they already owned outright, swapping square footage for view and a lower council tax band. The income-to-price multiple is a meaningful number for first-time buyers. They are not the main customer here.
About £356,000 buys you onto an island with a bridge, a bungalow if you want one, and tidal water from almost any window. That is above-average value for what it actually is, and below-average value for what people who have never been here think it should be.