Around £440,000 gets you the typical Southwick house, which counts as a discount if you have just looked at Brighton and a stretch if you have just looked at your payslip. About 135 homes changed hands in the last twelve months, so the market is real rather than theoretical. Not a hot market. Not a dead one. The wedge of coastal West Sussex that the estate agents haven't figured out how to sell to Londoners yet.
The type-by-type picture is where the ladder shows. A flat sits at around £234,000, off roughly 15 sales in the year. A terrace lands at about £415,000, off around 29 sales. A semi-detached is the shape of the market, roughly £455,000 across 55 sales, which is more than the flat, terrace and detached counts put together. A detached crosses £515,000. That is the price you pay to have your neighbour on the other side of a wall you don't share.
Council tax mostly lands in band C, with roughly three in ten homes at band A or B. That is a lower-banded stock than the sale prices would suggest, because the bands were set decades ago and nobody has revalued the coast since Brighton was still somewhere people came for the day rather than somewhere they moved to. On the modal bill it is not a punishing town to live in, however much the sale prices might imply otherwise.
Renting comes out at about £1,380 a month as the typical private rent across the Adur area, so that figure covers Shoreham and the rest of the neighbours alongside Southwick itself. By bedroom, a one-bed sits at around £980 a month, a two-bed at about £1,274, a three-bed at about £1,574, and a four-bed or larger at about £2,044. Rents have moved up nearly 4% on the year, which is what renters call the bit they cannot do anything about.
Set that against local incomes. Median household income sits near £52,000 a year. £440,000 is at a multiple of household income that mainstream lenders do not comfortably write, which anyone doing the arithmetic on the back of an envelope has already worked out. This is not a first-buyer town at typical prices. It is a second-buyer town, or a two-earner town, or a your-parents-helped town. The stock at the cheaper end is the flat market, and the flat market managed 15 sales in a year, so if you are chasing that price band the competition is real.
Two and a half out of five is the honest verdict on what houses cost here. Not because Southwick is overpriced by south-coast standards, which it is not, but because £440,000 buys what £440,000 buys, and the market is not currently doing the sort of growth that would make today's price look cheap by next spring. Fair value for a fair coast, at prices set by everyone who wanted Brighton and got here instead.