Houses in Totnes cost about £388,000, which buys a good deal of Devon and almost none of it flat. Flats go for around £300,000. Terraces sit just under £375,000. Detached houses run to about half a million. Nobody here is getting a bargain, and nobody is being fleeced either.
The Land Registry recorded 107 sales in the twelve months to late May 2026, at a median of £388,000. Broken out by type, 15 flats sold at a median of £300,000, 36 terraces at about £373,000, 33 semi-detached houses at £390,000, and 23 detached houses at £520,000. The gap that matters is a small one. A terrace and a semi sit almost on top of each other, which means the real jump in this town is not from mid-terrace to something with a side passage, it is from anything attached to anything that is not.
The official house price index put the average for the area at about £364,000 in May 2026, down about 7% across the previous twelve months and up about 8% over five years. Flats moved further, down about 10% over the same twelve months to an index average of about £191,000. Those are published changes for the index area rather than anybody's forecast, and a year is a short window in a town where 107 homes changed hands.
Council tax lands lower than the frontages suggest. Band B is the most common band, about 36% of dwellings sit in bands A or B, and a band D bill comes to about £2,615 a year. A place with this many listed elevations is billed like a place with considerably fewer.
Renting is published across the district rather than the town. The typical private rent across the South Hams area was about £1,000 a month as of April 2026, up about 3% over the year, and that is a mean from the official rent index rather than a median of what is currently in an agent's window. By size, one-bedroom homes average about £730 a month, two-bedroom about £910, three-bedroom about £1,120, and four-bedroom or larger about £1,610. All of those cover South Hams as a whole, fields included.
Median household income across the area was about £53,000 before tax in the financial year to March 2023, modelled by the Office for National Statistics rather than counted this morning. Set that gross figure against a £388,000 median and the position is clear enough: a stretch on one income, a firm commitment on two, and the reason a lot of buyers here arrive with equity from somewhere else rather than a payslip from down the road.
Of the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate's floor area, about 68% of them, the median worked out at roughly £4,200 per square metre, on a typical floor area of 95 square metres. Per square metre is the number that survives contact with a viewing, because it does not care how pretty the door is.
The bedroom mix from the 2021 census runs about 37% with three bedrooms, about 31% with two, about 20% with four or more and about 13% with one. Three-bedroom searches are fishing in the biggest pond. One-bedroom searches are fishing in a puddle, and paying flat prices for the privilege.
For a market town with a main-line station, a tidal river and several hundred listed buildings, the money being asked holds up well against what turns up on the other side of the contract. Value is one of the stronger things about the place. It will not feel that way at the moment of signing, which is true of nowhere in Devon and everywhere in Devon at once.