Sea air, sand and surf make house prices buoyant: Halifax survey

Sea air, sand and surf make house prices buoyant: Halifax survey

	Published : Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:05 By : Paula Demarzio Print this Story

There may be hardly a few souls among us who wouldn’t like to live by the seaside; and there is no need for any research to prove that. But property firm Halifax Estate Agents has done just that to find out how, despite declining house prices across the UK, seaside properties command higher process. The lure of low-flying gulls, cool sea breeze, sun, sand and surf have added the kind of premium to house prices that would have injected life into the currently sluggish UK housing market.

The survey covering the past 10 years found that house prices in 2/3rds of seaside towns had risen faster than the UK’s average of 186 percent.

Leading the premium lot is Sandbanks in Dorset, the most expensive coastal town where the average home will cost you upwards of half a million pounds. In terms of popularity, Sandbanks is followed by many coastal areas in the South East and South West.

Lytham St Annes is another hotspot for seaside-home hunters. The Halifax survey covering 75 seaside towns has established that homebuyers are willing to pay more to be able to live by the seaside. This led to property prices rising considerably. The average price of a home in Falmouth, Cornwall increased nearly £200,000, 311.5 percent more than the price in 1995. Penzance, also in Cornwall, saw prices rise 302.2 percent over the same period.

Areas in east Sussex such as Brighton and Norfolk’s Brancaster had also seen prices rise more than 280 percent over the ten years. The general observation was that house prices in almost half of the seaside towns surveyed had at least tripled.

While the 10-year figures may seem discouraging to the prospective seaside home buyer, the scene is comparatively different over the past 12 months. The focus seems to have shifted from the South to the North of England during the last year. Property prices in Maryport, Cumbria have risen 42 percent. Of the current top twenty seaside towns, three more beside Maryport are also located in Cumbria: Furness, Whitehaven and Workington.

Despite the increasing prices in the Cumbrian seaside towns, people would still find them more affordable than any other seaside property in the UK currently. In Hartlepool in the North East, the average house price is in the region of seventy seven thousand pounds, making it the most affordable of seaside properties.