About £307,500 for the median house, which is what the market has decided a bungalow, a driveway, and a walk to the platform are worth. Flats at roughly £156,000. Detached houses at nearly £390,000. About 130 sales in the last year. Middle-of-the-market pricing in a town built for the middle.
The median across the last twelve months was about £307,500 spread over roughly 130 transactions, which is a healthy amount of movement for somewhere this size. The split by type tells you what your money gets you. Flats come in at around £156,000, which for anywhere within an hour of the south coast is the cheap shelf. Terraces at about £280,000. Semis at £320,000. Detached houses at nearly £390,000. What is striking is how narrow the terrace-to-semi gap is: forty grand between a mid-terrace and a semi means the market values a bit of side-space, but not much. The jump from semi to detached is another seventy grand, which is roughly what a bigger garage costs.
The modal council-tax band is C, and only about a fifth of dwellings fall into bands A or B. That is not the profile of a town with a lot of cheap starter flats, and it is not the profile of a town with a lot of mansions either. It is what a landscape of post-war family houses and bungalows looks like when the Valuation Office got round to banding it in 1991.
Rent at the local-authority level runs at typical private rent across the Wealden area of about £1,260 a month, which is a Wealden figure rather than a Polegate-specific one, so treat it as the pricing weather rather than the street forecast. By bedroom count, the local-authority typicals sit at around £895 for a one-bed, £1,140 for a two-bed, £1,425 for a three-bed, and just over £2,090 for anything four-bed or larger. The gap between a two-bed and a three-bed is roughly £290 a month, which is what the Wealden rental market thinks a spare bedroom is worth.
Household income here runs at about £51,000 a year, which puts the median house at roughly six times median income. Six times income is what the south-east has trained everyone to expect, and it is neither a bargain nor a punishment. Two earners on that combined income can service a mortgage on a semi. One earner on that income is looking at a flat and hoping for a promotion.
Above average for value, at three and a half out of five. You are paying middle-of-the-market prices for a middle-of-the-market town, which is fair, and if you want cheaper you buy further north, and if you want more house you buy further from the station.