A typical home in Purley sells for just under £500,000. Flats come in at under £300,000. Detached houses go for about £800,000. Prices have barely moved in a year. It is two property markets sharing one postcode, and the average describes neither of them.
The Land Registry recorded 316 sales in Purley in the year to May 2026, at a median price of £499,999. Flats sold for about £295,000 across 92 sales, terraced houses for about £423,000 across 43, semi-detached houses for about £568,000 across 87, and detached houses for about £802,000 across 94. Detached houses outsold flats by two. A buyer browsing Purley is choosing between two different budgets that happen to share the same train station.
The official house price index put the average price at about £397,000 in May 2026, down 0.4% on the year before. That is a fall small enough to be lost in a single negotiation. Flats did a little worse, down nearly three per cent over the same twelve months to an index average of about £259,000. Over five years the index is up less than 1%. Anyone who bought five years ago as an investment has mostly been paying for the garden.
Band D is the most common council tax band in Purley, and only 4% of homes are in Bands A or B. Croydon's Band D bill is about £2,600 a year, which is the number most buyers can hold up against what they pay now. At the top of the scale, Band H runs to about £5,200 a year, and Purley has 370 homes in it. Some of the Webb Estate's gates have a bill to match.
Rents are only available for the whole borough, where typical private rent across Croydon was about £1,560 a month in April 2026, up 3.8% on the year. By size, that works out at about £1,250 for one bedroom, £1,560 for two, £1,840 for three and £2,650 for four or more. These are averages from the Office for National Statistics' rent index and they cover all of Croydon, not Purley's own lettings. Over the same year, landlords did better than sellers.
The Office for National Statistics modelled gross household income across Purley at about £84,000 a year in the financial year to March 2023, or about £55,000 once tax and other deductions come off. That income was earned three years before today's prices, and a mortgage gets paid from the smaller of the two numbers. On those incomes a flat is within reach for plenty of local households. A detached house needs either a second high salary or a lot of equity carried in from somewhere else.
Where a sale could be matched to the floor area on an energy certificate, the median price in Purley was about £5,170 per square metre. That covers 237 sales, 75% of the ones the Land Registry recorded, so a quarter of the market is missing from it. The typical home behind the figure has about 109 square metres of floor space, which is a decent family house and the reason the median sits where it does.
The 2021 Census counted 38% of Purley households in homes with four or more bedrooms, 29% with three, 23% with two and 10% with one. The four-bedroom house is the local default, and the one-bedroom flat is the rarest thing on the market. Most of the stock was built for families on good incomes, and that is who it still prices for.
Purley costs a middling amount for what a buyer gets. Flats are a reasonable entry point. The houses ask for money the local wages mostly don't supply.