About £344,000 for the typical sale. A flat at one end of the spread, a detached house at the other. Around 118 homes changed hands over the past year. Roughly six times what the median local household earns. Hamble money it isn't, Paulsgrove money it isn't either.
Break it down by property type and the spread opens up. A flat goes for around £160,000. A terrace lands at about £318,000. A semi at about £365,000. A detached at around £432,500. Semi-detached did the heavy lifting on volume, with about 62 of the 118 sales last year, well over half the year's transactions. Terraced made up around 29 sales, detached about 14. Flats are the thinnest market of the four, with only a handful trading hands. The flat at the cheap end and the detached at the dear end sit nearly three times apart, which is the same shape as most of coastal Hampshire.
The modal council tax band is C, the workhorse band for a stock built mostly between 1950 and 1982. About a fifth of dwellings sit at A or B, the cheap end of the scale. The rest spread up through D and E with a thinner tail in F and G. Nothing reaches H, the top of the scale. The bands are doing what the prices are doing: clustered around the middle, with little going on at either extreme.
Renting isn't really the local sport. About eight in ten residents own, which leaves the rental market doing a side hustle rather than running the show. The typical private rent across the Fareham area runs about £1,210 a month, an area-wide figure rather than something cut specifically for Portchester. By size, a one-bedroom flat goes for about £850 a month, a two-bedroom around £1,100, a three-bedroom around £1,360, a four-bedroom-or-larger for about £2,000. The rental ladder climbs the way the sales ladder does. Not punishing at the bottom, costly at the top.
The median household here pulls in about £58,000 a year. The typical sale price is about £344,000. That works out around six times income, which is the Hampshire commuter-belt arithmetic in one sentence. Stretchy on a single salary, workable on two, out of reach on neither when the second salary is there. The buyers turning up tend to be two-earner households with a Fareham office job and a Cosham one between them, the kind of buyer for whom a quarter of a million to four hundred thousand is a real number rather than a hypothetical. A first-time buyer on a single average wage is mostly looking at a flat or moving somewhere else.
What houses cost in Portchester sits where the rating panel puts it: above average, neither bargain-bin nor break-the-bank. The median is six times the median local wage. The flat is the way in. The detached is the way out.