Houses in Peacehaven cost about £340,000 on average, which is what the coast east of Brighton looks like when you strip away the seafront cafes and the Georgian frontages. A flat goes for around £187,000. A detached about £402,000. About 239 homes changed hands in the last year, which is decent volume for a town of this size. The town holds a middle-price bracket that the rest of the Sussex coast has largely priced away.
The £340,000 headline hides real variation across property types. Flats sit at around £187,000, which is unusually cheap for anything within a half-hour of Brighton and a straight giveaway that the flat stock here is post-war and modest, not seafront-view and boutique. Terraces come in around £300,000. Semi-detached houses run about £352,500, which is the median once you take the flats out. Detached houses land around £402,000. The volume splits the same way as the stock: 83 detached, 71 semi, 48 terrace, 37 flat. If you want a garden and a driveway, the town is set up to sell you one. If you want a one-bed above a takeaway with a view of the sea, you are in the wrong postcode.
The modal council tax band is C, which is the mid-range band and consistent with post-war housing that was not built to Georgian or Victorian scale. Roughly a quarter of dwellings sit in the two cheapest bands (A and B), which keeps annual bills at the entry end of the market manageable. That share is high enough to tell you the town has real affordable stock, not marketing claims about it.
The typical private rent across the Lewes area is about £1,320 a month, which is a local-authority average across a wider patch than Peacehaven itself. Peacehaven usually sits at the cheaper end of that patch. Breaking the local-authority figures down by bedroom count: a one-bed goes for around £920, a two-bed around £1,210, a three-bed about £1,490, and a four-bed or larger around £2,160. The rental market here is a functional one rather than a speculative one, and the numbers reflect that. Rents in the wider area have moved about six percent in the last year, which is warm but not the kind of heat that displaces people.
The median household income across the local area is around £48,750. That puts the median house at roughly seven times income, which is a stretch but not a fantasy in the current market. A flat at £187,000 is closer to four times income, which is one of the few numbers on the Sussex coast that still looks like something a first-time buyer could plausibly afford. Anyone looking for anything larger is looking at seven-plus times income, which is where most of England now sits, and not a Peacehaven-specific complaint. The town holds a lower price bracket than the coastline either side of it, and holds it consistently.
Houses cost less here than along the rest of this coast for the same square footage. That is the whole story. The town is priced for people who add up rather than aspire.