Around £265,000, and for that you get a whole house rather than a share of one. Terraces sit in the mid two hundreds. Detached homes run to the high three hundreds. Flats change hands for not much over a hundred and twenty thousand. Nothing about the pricing here is punishing, which is most of the argument for living in the Blackmore Vale in the first place.
The Land Registry logged 45 sales in the year to May 2026, at a median of £265,000. Terraced houses accounted for 15 of them at a median of £255,000, detached homes 13 at £375,000, flats 9 at £129,000 and semi-detached 8 at £286,000. Forty-five sales across a whole year is a thin market, and thin markets behave accordingly: the right house comes up rarely, and when it does, the person who has been watching for a year gets it.
The published house price index for the wider area put the average at about £326,000 as of May 2026, up 1.4% over the twelve months and about 11% across five years. Flats in the same index moved the other way, down about 1.9% over the year to roughly £168,000. A 1.4% change is not a market doing anything dramatic, and anyone selling you a story about momentum off the back of it is selling you something else.
Council tax lands mostly in band C, with about 30% of dwellings in bands A or B. Band D runs to roughly £2,765 a year, which is the figure worth holding against whatever you currently pay, since it is the one every authority in the country publishes on the same basis.
Renting is only measured at county scale. The mean private rent across the Dorset area was about £1,040 a month as of April 2026 on the Office for National Statistics index, up about 3.5% over the year, with one-bedroom homes averaging about £720, two-bedrooms about £950, three-bedrooms about £1,170 and four or more about £1,660. Those are Dorset-wide averages rather than the town's own, and a landlord quoting them as local is quoting a county.
Set against that, modelled household income for the area came to about £49,000 gross in the financial year to March 2023. That figure is before tax and it describes 2023 rather than today, but it frames the market honestly: ordinary local earnings still reach the middle of it without heroic assumptions about bonuses or parents.
Measured properly, the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate's floor area, roughly 69% of them, came out at about £2,970 per square metre, on a typical matched home of 87 square metres. Estate agents price in adjectives. That is the number sitting underneath the adjectives.
The stock buyers actually search on skews to the middle. About 37% of homes have three bedrooms and about 29% have two, with roughly 23% at four or more and about 11% at one, on the 2021 census count. Setting the filter to four bedrooms does not empty the page here the way it does in a village.
Cost is where this town is genuinely strong. Prices are modest, the bands are low, the bills are predictable, and the price is the last thing that will talk you out of moving here.