Top five per cent of properties in the local area

In The Weald, the gap was £82,700 in 2017. By the autumn of 2020, it had grown to £96,100, equivalent to a change of £13,400.

If a transaction happens after 31st of March 2021, the average stamp duty bill rises from nil to £9,885.

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.

This chart shows how sales levels in the local area sit now compared with seven months ago. We’ve indexed all property types so they start at the same point so you can easily see how they’ve moved in relation to each other.

Property types are a handy measure of the shape of the market in a local area. For example, areas with lots of flats tend to be urban in character because there is huge pressure on land. A large number of detached homes means that the area is suburban and not very densely populated.