Chichester's housing mix

As property comes in all shapes and sizes, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how Chichester’s property market compares locally and to the rest of the UK.

Central Chichester (PO19 postcode) has a very similar housing mix to the UK average; with around 20% detached houses, 25% semi-detached houses, 25% terraced houses and 30% flats.

I’ve said in the past though that the outskirts of Chichester can be a good place to look for investment properties as you get more ‘bricks for your buck’. This is evident in the PO18 postcode, where just 6.8% of the properties are flats, whilst detached houses make up the largest segment of the market (42.5%). It’s a similar story in PO20, with just under 10% of properties being flats, as detached houses dominate the area (44.8% of homes are detached).

The plethora of older terraced properties in Chichester’s city centre, as well as an increasing number of new-build sites favouring terraced configurations, means one in four Chichestrians now live in a terraced home.

Interestingly, when we take a look at how the price of each property type has fared in the last 12 months, it is those terraced houses that have performed the best, increasing by 1.9%. This compares to a 1.5% rise in the price of semi-detached houses in the past year, a 1.1% rise in detached houses and a drop of 0.5% in the price of flats.

Flats have underperformed the market if you look on a longer-term basis too. Average property prices in Chichester are up 17% in the last five years and yet flats are up just 13.3%. Over a ten-year period the gap has widened further, with the average Chichester property rising in price by 41.4%, whilst flats lag behind with an increase of 31.7% (bear in mind, that 9.7% difference actually means houses have risen by around a third more than flats have!)

It will be interesting to see how the developers of the large number of new housing schemes in Chichester decide to spread their mix of housing. Whereas there seemed to be a boom in large-scale developments of apartments throughout the UK in 2002-2007, Chichester largely ignored this fad.

Developers now seem to prefer to build houses, which are more in demand whilst commanding a higher price tag. They’ve even found a way to maximise the land they build on (one reason apartment blocks were popular) by creating large numbers of three-storey townhouses. You also don’t see many new-build two-bedroom houses when, for the sake of making the plot a few feet wider, developers can stretch it to a three-bedroom house (even if the third bedroom is often a ‘box’ room).

If you’d like to ‘stay alert’ of the developments in Chichester’s property market you can do so by visiting www.bit.ly/chipropertynews to sign up for my free weekly update.

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