“Don’t hate me,” said Theo Spink of the view from her office on Tuesday afternoon, “but the sun is shining, there’s a gentle breeze, people are arriving for Easter, eating ice-cream. It’s all rather charming.”
If the town of Salcombe, situated on the neck of a narrow estuary in south Devon, sounds idyllic, that is because “it really, really is”, she said. “When the sun shines, you could be in the Mediterranean. It is that beautiful.”
As a local estate agent, Spink has other reasons to be cheerful this week. According to new figures from Halifax, Salcombe is now home to the most expensive seaside properties in Britain, displacing the millionaires’ favourite: Sandbanks in Dorset.
The average Salcombe house price last year reached £1,244,025, compared with a national average of £344,185. The tiny spit of land that makes up Sandbanks may be home to some of the most expensive properties per square foot in the world, but its overall average price last year was considerably lower than its Devon neighbour, at just over £950,000.
This is not a market being driven by locals. While one in 12 of all properties in the local South Hams area are second homes, according to the district council, in some coastal spots such as Salcombe that figure is much, much higher. “I’d have thought perhaps 80% of our sales are to second home owners, people looking for holiday homes or lets,” said Spink, who is the retail sales director of local agents Luscombe Maye. It is marketing a two-bed beachfront penthouse with estuary views at £2.6m.
Prices in Salcombe have risen 123% in a decade and an astonishing 33% in a year – but in some locations the jump has been even steeper. Yarmouth, on the Isle of Wight, recorded a 53% leap in average prices to £611,000 in the year from 2021-22, according to Halifax, and prices in towns including Aldeburgh in Suffolk, Campbelltown in Argyll and Bute, and Padstow in Cornwall all rose by more than 40%.
These are familiar problems for picturesque communities, but the solutions are not obvious. South Hams council declared a housing crisis in 2021 and councillors voted unanimously last year to back a policy where council tax on second homes would be charged at double the usual rate. Unlike in Wales, however, where local authorities can charge council tax premiums of up to 300% on second homes, English councils are awaiting extra powers being considered under the government’s local government and levelling up bill.
“Affordability is an issue that the council has been raising at a local and national level and it is particularly prevalent in our coastal communities,” South Hams council said in a statement. “We have taken significant steps to try and address the issue and will continue to actively seek solutions.”
Julian Brazil, the Liberal Democrat opposition leader on the district and county councils, said: “The problem is that the key workers – and in that I include not just the teachers and the nurses and the care workers, but also the cleaners and the dustman and the postmen and basically everyone that keeps it going – just cannot afford to live down here.
“In the winter, in February, you’ll look across at Salcombe, and there aren’t any lights on. A group of thriving pubs used to host a lively games league in the town, all of which is now gone,” he says. “That’s a slightly flippant example [of how] the vitality is drawn out by the fact you don’t have people there all year round. So many of the traditional things that you would have done just no longer happen.”
The ability to charge extra council tax would raise important sums for the council, though he also points to a tax loophole that he says has allowed 1,900 second homes in the area to switch to business rates and pay no council tax at all. What it would not do, he says, is deter the area’s super-rich second home buyers: “It costs them more than that to fill their boat up with petrol. It’s peanuts to these people.”
Beth Hillier, owner of a “coastal beach lifestyle shop” called Aloft, can see both sides of the issue: businesses struggle to find staff, she says, parking is a problem and those who work in the town frequently have to commute from elsewhere.
For those who visit, however, she thinks Salcombe’s exclusivity is part of its appeal. “It’s an expensive place to be and that’s what the attraction has been.
“It’s this little unknown spot that people have discovered over the years [with] a very tasteful, relaxed pace of life. I do think people like the feeling that they’re somewhere expensive, and it’s just got that sort of very relaxed vibe where people stopped life and got off the treadmill for a week.”
