A house in Lymington costs about £410,000, which is roughly seven times what the households living here actually earn. That is the headline figure over the past year, drawn from a bit over two hundred sales. Detached homes run close to £800,000. Flats change hands for about £245,000. The gap between those two numbers is the whole town in a single line.
Break the £410,000 down by what you are buying and it stops being one market and becomes four. A detached house is the top of the ladder at close to £800,000. A terrace comes in around £380,000 and a semi around £370,000, near enough the same money, so the choice between them is about which street rather than which budget. A flat is the way in at about £245,000. With just over two hundred sales across the year, this is a steady market rather than a frantic one, but nothing about the entry price makes it an easy one.
Council tax mostly lands in band C, which is where the middle of the town sits. Only about one home in six falls into the cheapest A-to-B bands, so the low end of the tax bill is as thin on the ground as the low end of the asking prices. Buy here and you are unlikely to be paying the smallest bill on the street.
Renting follows the same shape. Across the wider New Forest area the typical private rent is about £1,240 a month, and the by-size figures for that area put a one-bed at about £860, a two-bed at about £1,130, a three-bed at about £1,380, and anything with four bedrooms or more close to £2,000. Those are area-wide numbers rather than the town's own, and Lymington is the sort of place that sits at the firmer end of any range it appears in.
Set the prices against local earnings and the strain shows. The typical household here brings in about £56,000 a year, and the typical house costs about seven times that. On earnings like those, a £410,000 house is not something you save your way into on a salary. It is bought with equity from somewhere else, with an inheritance, or with a long memory of when this coast was cheaper. The people already here mostly bought before the numbers looked like this. The people arriving now tend to be selling something larger elsewhere and trading the floor space for the postcode.
So what do houses cost in Lymington? More than the wages here would suggest and about what the setting commands: £410,000 in the middle, £245,000 at the bottom, and close to £800,000 for the detached house with room for the boat on the drive. It is not the cheapest stretch of the south coast and it never tries to be. Priced honestly for what it is, which is neither a bargain nor a fleecing, just expensive in the way the good bits of this coast always are.