A lot. The typical home across the Stockbridge area sold for about £625,000 over the past year, which is the kind of figure that separates the browsers from the buyers. Only around seventy homes changed hands in that time. The stock is old, listed, and priced like it knows exactly how pretty it is. If you came looking for a Hampshire bargain by a chalk stream, this is the part where the mood shifts.
Split the price by type and the range does the talking. Detached houses, the thing most people picture when they imagine moving here, ran to about £830,000. Semi-detached homes came in around £420,000 and terraces close behind at about £416,000, so the gap between a detached house and everything else is roughly the price of a second house. Flats, of which there were only a handful, sat near £300,000, which in most towns buys a house and here buys a front door and a share of the roof. The market is thin and top-heavy, and the headline hides how much of it is aimed squarely at the well-off.
Council tax follows the same pattern of costing more the longer you look. Most homes settle around band C, but the spread reaches well up the scale, and only about a fifth of properties fall into the two cheapest bands. That is a polite way of saying the tax bill is not going to be the thing that surprises you after the mortgage already has.
Renting is the softer landing, though softer is relative. Typical private rent across the Test Valley area runs to about £1,200 a month, a figure for the wider district rather than this postcode on its own, so treat it as the neighbourhood the town sits in rather than the town itself. By size it climbs steadily: roughly £865 a month for a one-bedroom, about £1,100 for a two-bedroom, around £1,370 for a three-bedroom, and close to £1,950 once you want four bedrooms or more. Renting buys you the address and the river walks without the six-figure commitment, which for a lot of people is the only realistic way in.
Set the buying price against what people here actually earn and the strain shows. A typical household income in the area is about £64,000, which is comfortable by most measures and still nowhere near enough to make a £625,000 house feel casual. That is a purchase price roughly ten times a year's income, and the arithmetic only works for buyers arriving with equity from somewhere else, a substantial deposit, or both. First-time buyers on a single local wage are, in plain terms, looking at the wrong town.
So the honest verdict on cost is that Stockbridge is expensive and unapologetic about it. Houses here are priced for people who already have money, not people hoping to build it, and the value on offer for the pound is close to the bottom of the scale. Lovely place. Steep bill.