Chiswick-at-a-discount, and the discount is growing. The median transaction lands at about £456,000. Flats near £330,000. Detached homes past a million. Down about three per cent on the year, which means the last twelve months of buyers are having a quiet conversation with their bank statements.
About nine hundred transactions cleared the market over the last twelve months. The typical sale price came in near £456,000, but that figure is doing a lot of averaging. Flats, which make up more than half the sales here, sat near £330,000. Terraced houses closer to £630,000. Semis at about £700,000. Detached homes north of a million. The spread is what you would expect in a district where a converted mansion-block one-bed and a full Victorian villa share the same postcode and neither one is embarrassed about it. The stock does the pricing work more than the postcode does.
Council tax lands nearly half the district in bands A or B, with band B doing the biggest share of the work. Which sounds cheap for a place selling flats at a third of a million, and mostly is, until the reader remembers that the valuation list still runs on prices set decades ago and never refreshed. The bill lags the price by a very long way. Welcome for everyone paying it, and slightly awkward for the council trying to fund services on it.
Renting reads similarly. The typical private rent across the Brighton and Hove area lands at about £1,820 a month, and that is the local-authority figure rather than the neighbourhood's own. One-bed lets sit near £1,200 a month. Two-beds around £1,500. Three-beds close to £1,800. Four beds and up start at about £2,500. Rent has held roughly steady over the last twelve months, which is a rare Brighton-and-Hove headline. It is also meaningfully below the equivalent line for a Zone 2 mansion-block flat, which is the specific arbitrage the London leaver demographic keeps making.
Median household income in the district comes in around £58,000. Median house price at about £456,000. That gap is not the sort a starter mortgage on one Hove wage bridges, which is why the first-time buyer on one salary is not really the demographic doing the buying. Buyers arrived with cash from a London sale, a deposit from parents who bought when prices were sane, or a joint income that already assumed two salaries and a spreadsheet. Everyone else is renting, which is why the rental market feels tight even when the sales market is going backwards.
Average pricing for what it is, on a two-and-a-half-out-of-five verdict. Not cheap. Not extortionate for the Regency-terrace stock. Softer than it was a year ago, which the sellers know and the buyers know, and everyone is having the same quiet conversation about it in different rooms.