Comfortably north of four hundred thousand pounds, and that number flatters nobody. The detached ones go for well over half a million. Flats change hands in the low three hundreds. Barely fifty sales in a whole year. The headline is less a price than the midpoint between two towns that never bid against each other.
The Land Registry recorded 48 sales in the year to April 2026, at a median of about £427,500. Twenty-three of those were detached houses, with a median around £650,000. Thirteen were flats, at about £320,000. Terraces at roughly £380,000 and semis at roughly £375,000 are, on those numbers, the same house with a different wall arrangement. A market this thin does not really have a price. It has a run of individual negotiations that get averaged afterwards and then printed as though they were a rate.
Direction of travel is quiet. The published house price index for the area put the average at about £326,400 as of May 2026, up about 1% across the preceding twelve months. Flats on their own were down about 2% over the same period. Neither of those is a movement to build a plan around: one is a market ticking over, the other is a dip small enough to vanish inside a single valuation.
Band E is the most common council tax band on the valuation list here, and about 27% of dwellings sit in bands A or B combined. A band D bill comes to roughly £2,765 a year, which is the figure most readers can hold up against their own. The bottom of the list is the thinner end in this town, and the banding says so before any estate agent does.
Renting is only measurable at county grain. The typical private rent across the Dorset area was about £1,040 a month as of April 2026, a mean from the Office for National Statistics rent index rather than a median of what is advertised in windows. By size, one-bedroom homes average about £720 a month, two-bedrooms about £950, three-bedrooms about £1,170, and four or more about £1,660. Those cover everything from an inland flat to a farmhouse with a paddock, so read them as the shape of the market and not as the rent on any particular street above the harbour.
Modelled gross household income for the area, before tax, was about £51,200 in the financial year to March 2023. Hold that next to a median sale approaching £430,000 and the conversation stops being about salaries. Whatever is buying these houses, it is not arriving as a payslip.
Per square metre, sales came in at about £4,378, measured across the ones that can be matched to an energy certificate's floor area, which is about 40% of them. The typical matched home was about 92 square metres. Fewer than half the sales can be measured that way, so it is a fair guide and a poor guarantee, and anyone quoting it at a viewing is quoting a partial sample with confidence it has not earned.
The stock underneath all this skews larger than the seaside cliche suggests. On the 2021 Census, about 38% of homes have three bedrooms and about 26% have four or more. Two-bedroom homes account for about 27%, and one-bedroom homes about 10%. The little flat everyone pictures when they picture a coastal town is the rarest thing on the list, which is precisely why it does not come cheap.
Value is where this town does worst, and not by a narrow margin. You are paying a World Heritage coastline premium into a market where fewer than fifty homes trade in a year, and scarcity sets the price long before condition, size or sense get a say.