Houses in Tavistock cost about £283,000 in the middle of the market, which for a stannary town sitting on the lip of Dartmoor is quietly ridiculous. Flats change hands around £155,000. Terraces around £235,000. The detached ones, the gravel-and-a-view end of things, sit near £435,000. Whatever the moor charges for scenery, nobody has thought to add it to the asking price.
The Land Registry recorded 187 sales in the year to May 2026, and the spread across them is unusually even for a town this size. Detached houses accounted for 54 of those sales at a median of about £435,000, terraces 53 at about £235,000, semis 41 at about £290,000, and flats 39 at about £155,000. Four property types, four genuinely different budgets, all inside the same set of postcodes. Most towns make you choose between the cheap version and the nice version by moving neighbourhood. Here you choose by choosing a roof.
The published house price index for the area put the average at about £295,000 as of May 2026, up 2% over the twelve months. Flats went the other way over the same year, down 2%. Neither of those is a movement worth building a life around, and anyone selling you a story about momentum in either direction is working from a fraction of a percent and a lot of enthusiasm.
Council tax lands at the cheap end of the scale. Band B is the most common band in the town, 40% of dwellings sit in bands A or B, and a band D bill runs to roughly £2,700 a year. That is the number worth holding against whatever you currently pay, because it is the one that arrives whether or not the market does anything interesting.
Renting is only measured across the wider West Devon area rather than Tavistock on its own, and the figure is a mean from the Office for National Statistics index rather than a median of what is advertised in an agent's window. On that basis the typical private rent was about £840 a month as of April 2026, working out at roughly £600 for a one-bed, £760 for a two-bed, £940 for a three-bed and £1,340 for anything with four bedrooms or more.
Against that, modelled median household income for the area was about £50,000 before tax in the financial year to March 2023, which describes that year rather than this one. A median house at about £283,000 is still a proper commitment on that kind of money, but it is the ordinary sort of stretch rather than the sort that requires two incomes, a parental deposit and a permanent expression of mild panic.
By floor space, the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate, about 72% of them, came in at roughly £3,350 per square metre, with a typical matched home measuring around 90 square metres. That is the honest way to compare a Bedford-era terrace against something newer off the Plymouth Road, since one of them is charging you for character and the other for insulation.
The bedroom mix from the 2021 census explains what actually comes up for sale. Three-bedroom homes make up 36% of the stock, two-beds 29%, four or more 24%, and one-beds 11%. A town built for families, then, with a decent tail of larger houses and a thin supply at the bottom, which is why the flats move quickly and the four-beds sit and think about it.
On cost alone, Tavistock is doing something most of the south west stopped doing years ago: offering a full ladder of house types at prices an ordinary household can look at without laughing. Whatever else you weigh up here, price is the part that works in your favour.