A typical home in Herne Hill sells for about £725,000, and most of what sells is a flat. Flats go for about half a million. Terraced houses go for well over a million. Semis cost more again. Which of those you can afford decides which Herne Hill you end up living in.
The Land Registry recorded 148 sales in the year to May 2026, with a median of £725,000. Flats made up the largest group, with 81 selling at a median of £518,000. The 51 terraced houses sold at a median of £1,255,000, and the 14 semi-detached houses at £1,474,100. Those terraces went up after the railway arrived in 1862, built for the clerks it brought in, and they now cost the kind of money the clerks' employers had.
The official house price index for the wider area was down about 3% in the twelve months to May 2026, with an average price of about £545,000. Flats fell a little further, down about 4% over the same year, and the index stood about 7% lower than five years earlier. None of that tells you where prices go next. It does mean a buyer here is negotiating in a soft market, and the seller's memory of what the flat upstairs fetched a few years ago is a figure from a different market. Land Registry records show what any flat here last sold for and when, and that price is the one to set against the asking price.
Band C is the most common council tax band, and 22% of homes are in bands A or B. A band D home here pays about £2,050 a year, which is the easiest number to set against your current bill.
Renting means quoting the borough. Lambeth's typical private rent was about £2,530 a month in April 2026, up about 7% on a year earlier, and that is a mean from the Office for National Statistics rent index across the whole borough. By size, Lambeth averaged about £1,880 for a one-bed, £2,350 for a two-bed, £2,680 for a three-bed and £3,730 for four bedrooms or more. There is no reliable figure for studios or rooms.
The Office for National Statistics models median household income across Herne Hill at about £82,000 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is a good income by most measures. It covers a flat at the local median with some room to spare, and it leaves a terrace well out of reach for anyone without a large deposit, a second high salary or both. The people buying the houses here are mostly the people who sold a house somewhere else first.
For the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate, about 67% of the year's total, the median price was about £9,170 per square metre, on a typical floor area of about 110 square metres. The sales without a certificate match are missing from that figure, so it describes most of the market and leaves out the rest.
The 2021 census counted 23% of households in one-bedroom homes, 28% in two bedrooms, 23% in three and 26% in four or more. That four-bed share is larger than the one-bed share, in a district where most homes are flats, because the Edwardian houses that did not get divided up are big. Families hunting a three-bed here are competing for the smallest slice of the stock.
Herne Hill is an expensive place to buy, with a gap between flats and houses wide enough that the two hardly count as one market. A flat is within reach on a good local income. A house needs a lot more than that.