Bournemouth house prices: £315,473 average, area by area

Asking prices are what sellers hope for. What counts is what homes actually change hands for, and every completed sale in England and Wales is recorded by HM Land Registry and published. This page reads those records for Bournemouth: the official average, why it flatters some parts of town and punishes others, and what the middle home actually sold for in Southbourne, Winton, Charminster, Boscombe, Kinson, Westbourne and the town centre.

Two things to fix before the numbers. First, the official index does not measure Bournemouth. It measures Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, one council since 2019, which means Sandbanks and Canford Cliffs are in the same average as Boscombe and West Howe. Second, Bournemouth sells more flats than anything else. Flats and maisonettes were 42% of everything sold in the town over the last twelve months, which is closer to inner London than to the rest of Dorset, and it drags every headline figure down in a way that has nothing to do with whether an area is nice.

The headline figure

The average home across Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole sold for £315,473 in May 2026, the most recent month published in the UK House Price Index. That is down 1.0% over the year.

The longer record is harder reading. BCP peaked at £345,134 in December 2022. Three and a half years later the average is £29,661, or 8.6%, below that peak in cash terms, and a good deal further below it once inflation is allowed for. This is not a wobble. Taking the same month each year, the average has fallen in every one of the last three years:

Set that against the country and the gap is real rather than statistical. Over the same twelve months the South West rose 1.7% to £303,000 while BCP fell 1.0%. England averaged £271,000. A coastal market that spent 2021 and 2022 outrunning the region has spent the three years since giving that lead back.

What it means for you

Almost all of the fall is in flats. Across BCP, flats and maisonettes were down 3.4% over the year to an average of £200,429, while semi-detached houses were up 1.1% to £362,627 and detached houses up 0.2% to £560,635. Terraced houses were flat at £295,873.

If you are buying a flat, this is the strongest hand buyers have had here in five years, and the town-centre and cliff-top blocks are where the softness is concentrated. If you are selling a flat, a 2022 price is not coming back this year, and the block next door is competing with you. If you are selling a house, the index says you are roughly where you were twelve months ago.

If you are a first-time buyer, the average first-time-buyer purchase across BCP was £252,843 in May 2026, down 1.3% over the year. A home mover paid £394,227. The £141,384 gap between those two is the size of the step from a first flat to a family house on this coast.

What Bournemouth itself sells for

This is where the council-wide average stops being useful.

The table below is our own analysis of 2,486 residential sales that HM Land Registry records under the town of Bournemouth and that completed between 1 July 2025 and 30 June 2026, taken from HM Land Registry Price Paid data. It shows the median, the middle sale, which one enormous transaction cannot distort. The Bournemouth median over that period was £301,000. The mean over the same sales was £340,135, and the £39,135 gap between those two numbers is exactly why we use the median: a handful of clifftop houses pull an average up and tell you nothing about what you will pay.

The last column is the point. Westbourne is not a cheap area. Nine out of ten homes sold there are flats, and a market made almost entirely of flats will always post a low median next to one made of detached houses. The same goes for BH2 and BH1. The bottom of that table is not a ranking of neighbourhoods, it is a ranking of what kind of building sits in each postcode.

The same postcodes, compared like for like

Take one property type at a time and the map redraws itself.

Read across the detached row and Bournemouth splits into two towns. BH3, Talbot Woods and Branksome Woods, is the expensive one, at a detached median of £795,000 off only 34 sales. Littledown and Southbourne follow at £585,000 and £574,640. Winton, Ensbury Park and Kinson, the postcodes that sell the most houses in the town, sit between £365,000 and £400,000.

Read across the flat row and the whole town fits inside £79,000. The dearest flats, in Southbourne at £245,000, cost less than half what a detached house costs in the same postcode. Westbourne, bottom but three on the overall table, has the highest flat median in Bournemouth at £250,000, which tells you what the raw ranking was hiding.

Where the largest and smallest markets are

Volume matters as much as price if you are trying to sell. Four postcodes carried more than half of everything sold in the town over the year: BH9 Winton and Moordown (400 sales), BH6 Southbourne (333), BH8 Charminster and Queen’s Park (330) and BH1 town centre and East Cliff (288). If you own in one of those, there is a buyer pool and there are comparables. BH3, with 65 sales in twelve months, is thin enough that a single unusual house moves the median.

At postcode-sector level the extremes widen again. BH6 4, the Southbourne and Tuckton streets east of Fisherman’s Walk, had a median of £543,000 across 64 sales, the highest sector in the town. BH2 5, the West Cliff, came in at £175,000 across 69 sales, the lowest. They are three miles apart and they are not the same market in any sense.

A note on the data

These are sales that had completed and been registered by early August 2026. Registration lags completion, so the most recent weeks in the window are under-counted, which is why we use a twelve-month period rather than a quarter. The figures exclude commercial and other non-residential transactions, and they cover only sales that the Land Registry records under the town of Bournemouth, so Poole and Christchurch are not in them. The council-wide UK House Price Index figures at the top of this page do include both.

If you want to check one specific address rather than an area, every completed sale is public and free to search on the HM Land Registry Price Paid service.

Frequently asked questions

What is the average house price in Bournemouth?

The official average for Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole was £315,473 in May 2026, down 1.0% over the year, according to the UK House Price Index. Our own read of Land Registry sales for the town of Bournemouth alone puts the median at £301,000 over the twelve months to June 2026.

Are Bournemouth house prices falling?

Yes, gently, and they have been for three years. The BCP average peaked at £345,134 in December 2022 and is now 8.6% below that. Flats are doing the falling: down 3.4% over the year to May 2026, while semi-detached houses rose 1.1%.

Which is the most expensive part of Bournemouth?

BH3, Talbot Woods and Branksome Woods, on both measures: the highest overall median at £460,000 and by far the highest detached median at £795,000. At sector level, BH6 4 in Southbourne and Tuckton is the priciest at £543,000.

Why is Westbourne cheaper than Kinson in the table?

Because 90% of what sells in Westbourne is a flat and 90% of what sells in Kinson is a house. Compare flat with flat and Westbourne is the most expensive place in Bournemouth to buy one, at a median of £250,000.

How much is a detached house in Bournemouth?

The median detached house in the town sold for £450,000 over the twelve months to June 2026. That ranges from £365,000 in BH11 Kinson to £795,000 in BH3 Talbot Woods.

How much is a flat in Bournemouth?

The median flat sold for £200,000. Every postcode district in the town falls between £166,000 and £250,000, so the address makes far less difference to a flat than it does to a house.

Sources

• UK House Price Index, Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole (ONS and HM Land Registry) for the council-wide average, property-type, buyer-type and regional figures.
• UK House Price Index data, monthly series for Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole for the December 2022 peak and the year-by-year table.
• HM Land Registry Price Paid data for our own analysis of 2,486 residential sales in the town of Bournemouth, July 2025 to June 2026.
• HM Land Registry Price Paid search to check an individual address.

Next: what the commute actually costs, on our Bournemouth train times to London page, and what is being built and where, on Bournemouth planning news.

Figures are provisional and revised as more sales complete. Always confirm the latest numbers against the linked HM Land Registry and ONS sources before making a decision.