About £400,000 for the typical sale, which is what restraint looks like in a Chichester Harbour postcode. Detached around £550,000. Semis around £367,000. Flats from £205,000. Cheaper than the agents would price the postcode if they could get away with it.
The headline median came from around fifty-eight transactions over the last year, which is enough activity for a village this size to qualify as a real market rather than a thin one. The split by type matters more than the average. Detached homes topped the range at roughly £552,000 a sale, which is where Southbourne starts approaching its neighbours to the east. Semi-detached, which carry most of the stock, cleared at around £367,000 and are the truest read on what people are actually paying here. Terraces landed slightly higher at about £390,000, which scarcity of older stock will do to numbers. Flats sat at the entry point with a typical sale of £205,000, though only six of those changed hands in the year, so anyone counting on flat liquidity should count again.
On council tax, band C absorbs the modal share of homes. Roughly one in six properties sits in the cheaper A or B brackets, which is fewer than the area pattern and tells you the housing stock is squarely middle of the band range rather than at the bottom. That is what post-war semi-detached and modest detached estates produce on the valuation list.
For renters, the wider Chichester area runs to about £1,320 a month as a typical private rent, with the annual change at about three percent. That is a local-authority average, not the village's own figure, and Southbourne sits inside the upper portion of it given the surroundings. Broken down by size, a one-bedroom property runs to about £940 a month, a two-bed roughly £1,210, a three-bed around £1,500, and anything four-bedroom or larger lands closer to £2,100. The rental market is thin compared to the ownership market, which is what happens when three in four homes are owned and the available stock to let is the residual.
Affordability comes back to the income picture. The typical household pulls in about £61,000 a year. The headline median at £400,000 puts the ratio at roughly six and a half times income, which is a stretch on a single salary, a workable mortgage for two professional incomes, and out of reach for a first-time buyer relying on either alone. The South East as a whole runs hotter than this on price-to-income, so Southbourne is not the place that breaks the pattern. It is the place that fits it without setting any records.
Above-average prices for above-average surroundings, which is what an upper-quartile Chichester Harbour postcode produces. Not cheap by national standards, not punishing by South East standards, exactly where the numbers say it should sit.