Latest News

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

We define the premium properties as those with a price in the top 5% of all local houses. Likewise we define the super-premium end of the market as the top 1%. This chart shows those prices points in the context of the mid market.

The socio-economic profile is a telling measure of the constitution of people in a local market. We have to be careful when talking about the economic profile of local residents because no statistical measure will really illustrate the character of an area. However, we’ve used the governments ‘NS-Sec’ classification data on our area, which defines local residents in those terms.

This chart shows the most recent split of the number of people buying flats as opposed to houses, as well as the last ten years’ worth of data. This is useful information for anyone with an interest in the local market because it affects the overall market dynamic.

By looking back over the last eight quarters, it’s quite enlightening to see how average sales prices have changed for individual house types. Obviously, the bigger types sell for more, but the quarter-on-quarter changes tell an interesting story.

Since 2009, the highest quarterly price growth in Snodland, Larkfield & West Malling was during Barack Obama’s first term (a rise of 14% in Q1 2011)