Newly released research from ONS highlighted the effect the pandemic had on the property market in different kinds of areas and found that house prices everywhere increased faster than the price of flats. The price of flats in towns actually fell during the pandemic.
As the race for space intensified and people moved away from smaller apartments in cities, semi-detached house prices in towns saw the biggest rise during the pandemic and larger homes with three or more bedrooms rose faster in price than smaller houses. House prices in coastal towns grew faster during the pandemic than towns inland.
The average price of properties in towns in 2020 ranged from £39,000 in Ferryhill. County Durham to £1,050,000 in Northwood, North London.
Six in ten towns with the highest average house prices were in the South East, while six in ten with the lowest were in the North East. All of the bottom ten were former industrial and mining towns in either the North of England or South Wales.
Between 2010 and 2020, a third of towns in the North East saw falling house prices. Ferryhill saw house prices fall 47%.
Sarah Coles, Personal Finance Analyst, Hargreaves Lansdown, says: “The race for space during the pandemic drove us out of cities and poky flats into bigger family homes in towns by the seaside. The trend was powerful enough to reverse the decline we’d seen in coastal towns over the previous decade.
"Buyers spurned cities and snapped up homes in towns and villages. We also embraced the fresh sea air, and coastal towns saw prices outstrip those further inland. It’s likely that we prize the open air more highly now. We’re also prepared to do longer commutes to be beside the seaside when we get home, especially now more of us are moving to working from home for at least part of the time.
"The pandemic has also seen us fall out of love with apartment living. Months of lockdown convinced us that compromising on space both indoors and out was too high a price for living in the centre of things. This was particularly the case outside cities because the price of flats in towns actually fell during the pandemic.
"Meanwhile, bigger houses, with three bedrooms or more, boomed in price, as more of us started to understand the allure of the home office. We were willing to compromise on the seclusion of a detached home to get more space for our money, so semi-detached properties in towns gained the most value during the year.”
