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Whether you’re working from home or just want to enliven your living space, you can’t go wrong with houseplants. Gone are the days when a solitary, unloved spider plant was the extent of indoor greenery as now, the health and aesthetic benefits of houseplants has led to a boom in the types and species available.

Not every home is blessed with a separate study or dedicated home office, which has left the kitchen as a rather unconventional place to set up ‘shop’. But working next to the washing machine – is it really possible?

Unlike other investment strategies – complex pensions, scary stocks and shares or crazy crypto currencies – many of us have a head start when it comes to investing in property, as most of us are familiar with the concept of renting.

The lettings sector is highly regulated and it can be hard to keep up with all the new introductions and amendments. Here’s what’s on the current rental radar:

We were interested in looking at the starting prices of the top five per cent of properties in the local market. This chart displays the main house types side-by-side so you can see how they sit relative to one another.

In Maidstone & Barming, the average price of a property has risen by 156 per cent since 2000.

You might think you know our area inside out, but this chart might make you think again. We’ve split the area according to where people and families are in their lifecycle. This has a big impact on the housing market, with people needing different types of housing at different points in their life.

In this chart, we’ve compared sales levels for flats and houses in the last few quarters. We’ve opted to look at an index, rather than absolute numbers, to expose the underlying patterns. This means that both property types start at 100 at the start of the period, and you can see how they’ve changed since, on an equal basis.

Over the last two years, we’ve seen pretty strong performance in the local market. We wanted to see how different property types have performed, so we indexed the values at the start of the period. Property data updates quite slowly, so we’ve estimated the last 3 months.

The average amount of time someone lives in their property in Headcorn or Bearstead is actually 19 years.

Nobody ever spent their last days wishing they’d spent more time in the office. However, most of us have our nose to the grindstone to make ends meet and our area is no different. This chart shows how long the working week is for people here. The EU working time directive prohibits employees working more than 48 hours per week.

Provisional data from HMRC shows that 105,630 property sales went through in October 2020, the highest number recorded in a single month since 2016