Yes, and plenty of people here are doing exactly that. The town holds 159 listed buildings and five conservation areas, which is a lot of protected fabric for a place this size. Hundreds of planning applications have gone in across the area. The constraint is not spread evenly, and it falls hardest on precisely the streets that made you want to move here. What matters is not the town's reputation for heritage but which side of a boundary line your particular front door sits on.
Historic England's register lists 159 listed buildings in and around the town: one at grade I, three at grade II\*, and 155 at grade II. Listing applies to the whole building, inside and out, not just the pretty elevation facing the sea. Replacing windows, altering internal layouts, changing roof coverings or adding an extension all need listed building consent alongside any planning permission, and doing the work first and asking afterwards is a criminal offence rather than a paperwork problem. The grade matters less than owners expect. A grade II terrace is subject to the same consent regime as the grade I building, with the difference showing up in how much argument you get rather than whether you have to have it.
Five conservation areas cover parts of the town and its surroundings: Teignmouth Town Centre, Teignmouth St James, Holcombe, Holcombe Drive, and Shaldon on the far bank of the estuary. Conservation area status does not freeze a house, but it narrows what can be done without asking. Extra controls apply to demolition, to trees, and to external alterations that would be invisible to the planners anywhere else in town, and some permitted development rights that hold elsewhere are tighter inside the boundary. Two houses of identical age and identical appearance can sit on opposite sides of that line with entirely different rulebooks, which is the single most expensive thing buyers here fail to check.
None of this stops the town building. Planning applications across the area ran to 625 between April 2024 and June 2026, with 256 of those submitted in the last twelve months. That is a steady stream of loft conversions, rear extensions, replacement windows and garden rooms going through the system, from people who worked out what their house needed before they bought the materials.
The practical position is straightforward. Outside the conservation areas and away from the listed stock, the usual permitted development rights apply and a rear extension or a loft conversion may not need a full application at all. Inside them, or on any listed property, assume consent is required and budget for the time as well as the fee. The council's own planning search will tell you the constraints attached to a specific address in about the time it takes to make a coffee, and the phrase "scope to extend, subject to the usual consents" in a listing is doing the heaviest lifting in the whole advert.
Freedom to alter a home here is limited by the standards of an ordinary English town, and that is the price of the streets being worth protecting in the first place. Check the address before you fall for the house, not after.