Pagham sells cheap for a coastal village. The typical sale clears about £347,500. Detached at £400,000, flats at £160,000. Roughly 110 went through last year. Not bargain-bin. Just south-coast-cheap, which is a category of its own.
That headline £347,500 hides a stock that splits cleanly by type. Detached houses, the biggest slice of last year's transactions at around 45 sales, sat at about £400,000. Semi-detached did 40 sales at roughly £345,000. Terraces, fewer than 20 sales, ran around £295,000. Flats are barely a market here, with about five sales at roughly £160,000, which tells you what flats are in a village where nearly half the stock is bungalow. The interesting thing is that the spread between detached and terraced is tight by south-coast standards. Pagham does not have the kind of premium-prestige strip that pulls the top end of the market into another universe.
Council tax sits modally at band C, which is what you would expect for a market dominated by post-war family bungalows. About one in six homes is in band A or B, which is the cheaper tail and mostly the smaller flats and older terraces. Nothing in the village sits at band H. Whatever Pagham has, it does not have a stock of seven-figure mansions.
Renting tells a similar story, though the figures here are for the wider Arun area rather than the village alone. Typical private rent across the Arun area runs about £1,220 a month. By bedroom, a one-bed lets at about £840 a month, a two-bed at around £1,130, a three-bed at about £1,380, and a four-bed-or-larger at roughly £1,970. The Pagham slice of this is unlikely to sit at the top end of the range. The village rental market is small because most people own. Roughly 87 in a hundred homes are owner-occupied, which leaves a rental market that is more bungalow-bequeathed-to-family than buy-to-let portfolio.
Affordability is where the village stops looking quite so cheap. Median household income here runs about £42,800. A £347,500 typical sale is more than eight times that. That ratio is a stretch by any historical standard, even though Pagham looks affordable next to East Wittering and well under what Whitstable would charge for the same bungalow. The affordability gap exists not because Pagham is expensive but because incomes here are local-village incomes, while prices have been pulled by buyers coming in from Surrey and Brighton with equity from somewhere else. The buyer who already owns a house in Reigate finds Pagham cheap. The buyer who grew up in Pagham finds it about as reachable as the moon.
For what it is, Pagham is fair value. Not cheap in the way it once was, not expensive in the way Selsey-with-pretensions might want to be. The houses cost what they cost because the people buying them are mostly retired, mostly cash, and mostly here for the bungalow and the quiet rather than for a five-year capital play. That is what a 3.5-out-of-5 looks like in a market that the house-price index says is sliding rather than climbing.