About £359,000 buys the median sale in Selsey, and the market is heading the wrong way for sellers. Detached homes run at around £420,000. Semis go for roughly £330,000. Flats turn over at about £157,000 when any are listed. The headline is down close to 6% on the year, which is the polite way of saying nobody is in a hurry.
172 homes changed hands over the last twelve months. On a town of just over five thousand households, that is enough liquidity to call it a market, just not a brisk one. Detached did most of the heavy lifting, with about seventy of the year's sales in that bracket and a median around £420,000. Semis came next at roughly £330,000. Terraces followed at about £295,000. Flats sat at the bottom at about £157,000, because there are not many of them, and the ones that exist are not what most of the buyer base is here for. People moving to Selsey want a ground floor and a parking spot, not a leasehold flat above a takeaway.
The modal council tax band is D, which is the seaside-village default for a mostly mid-century housing stock. About a fifth of dwellings sit in bands A or B, where the smaller post-war builds live and where the first-time buyers who can stomach the drive to Chichester will find something.
Rent has to be quoted at the wider Chichester local-authority level, because Selsey on its own is too small a rental market to publish on. The typical private rent across the Chichester area runs at about £1,320 a month. A one-bedroom averages just under £940. A two-bed sits around £1,210. A three-bed lands at roughly £1,490, and anything with four bedrooms or more reaches around £2,100. None of that is cheap. Selsey's own rental stock is thinner than the figures suggest, because owner-occupiers run the place, and the renters who do live here are mostly working in care or sitting on second homes that pay for themselves over the summer.
The typical local household pulls in just under £41,000 a year. The median sale at £359,000 works out at nearly nine times annual pay, which is the maths that pushes the marginal buyer further down the bungalow scale, or further out toward Bognor Regis. The people moving in are largely cash buyers and down-sizers, where the equity from a sold home elsewhere covers the Selsey asking price with change left for the kitchen refit. The under-forties are not the marginal buyer here, and the numbers show why. A nine-times-income mortgage is not the kind of thing a high-street lender writes for anyone who is not already wealthy.
Houses in Selsey cost roughly £359,000 in the middle of the market. Reachable for cash buyers and the down-sizers, out of reach for the local first-time buyer trying to use a mortgage and a pay packet. Soft and falling, not because nobody wants to live here, but because the people who do are mostly already here.