England's house prices rose. Its holiday-home towns fell.

Ask anyone in a Cornish or Devon harbour town what has happened to the property market and you will hear the same thing: the second-home owners are selling up. We wanted to know whether the data agreed, so we went to the record of what homes actually sold for.

We analysed every open-market residential sale registered with HM Land Registry in England in 2023 and in 2025, then compared twenty well-known holiday and second-home towns against the country as a whole. The answer is that something real is happening, but it is narrower and sharper than the headlines suggest.

England went up. Its holiday towns went down.

Across England the median sale price rose from £287,000 in 2023 to £295,000 in 2025, a rise of 2.8%. Across the twenty holiday towns the median fell from £365,000 to £340,000, a drop of 6.8%. The two moved in opposite directions.

Sales volume tells the same story. England registered 7.5% more sales in 2025 than in 2023. The holiday towns registered fewer.

It is not a change in what is selling

A falling median can be an illusion. If fewer large houses sell in a given year, the median drops without a single home losing value. So we ran the same comparison on detached houses alone, the most consistent property type to track.

England's median detached home sold for £420,000 in both 2023 and 2025, completely flat. In the holiday towns the median detached home fell from £515,000 to £475,000, a drop of 7.8%. Like for like, on the same property type, holiday-town values fell while the country's stood still.

The dearer the resort, the harder it fell

This is the finding that surprised us most. The falls are not spread evenly across the seaside. They are concentrated at the expensive end.

Towns with a 2023 median above £450,000 fell by an average of 12.2%. Towns below that line fell by an average of 4.0%. Across the twenty towns, the correlation between how expensive a town was in 2023 and how far it fell by 2025 is -0.62. In plain terms, the pricier the resort, the steeper the drop.

The top of the market thinned out accordingly. Sales above £750,000 across these towns fell from 353 in 2023 to 252 in 2025, a drop of 28.6%.

It is worth being honest about the exceptions. Not every holiday town fell. Fowey rose 11.6%, Seahouses 8.7%, Lyme Regis 4.7% and Ambleside 3.7%. Whitby was flat. The pattern is strong but it is not universal, and the smallest towns carry the fewest sales, so their individual figures move easily.

Why blaming the council tax is too simple

Most of the coverage has pinned this on one policy: the council tax premium that let English councils double the bill on second homes from April 2025. Around 211 councils applied it in its first year.

But it did not arrive alone. Three tax changes hit the same buyer inside six months.

1. From 31 October 2024, the stamp duty surcharge on additional homes rose from 3% to 5%, adding thousands to the cost of buying a second property.
2. From April 2025, councils could charge up to 100% extra council tax on furnished homes that are nobody's main residence.
3. From April 2025, the furnished holiday lettings tax regime was abolished, removing the mortgage interest relief and capital gains advantages that made letting a holiday home worthwhile.

Any one of these would have cooled demand. Together they changed the economics of owning a second home at the buying stage, the holding stage and the letting stage at once. Attributing the whole move to council tax misreads what happened.

These towns had priced themselves on a buyer that the tax system was steadily removing.

What this means if you own or want to buy in one of these towns

If you are selling, the danger is anchoring to a 2022 or 2023 valuation. In the towns above, that number is not a starting point to negotiate down from. It belongs to a market with a buyer who is now paying substantially more tax to be there. A valuation built on what the house next door fetched three years ago will sit on the market and drift.

If you are buying, the same figures are an opportunity, particularly above £750,000 where competition has thinned most.

And if you are anywhere else in England, the wider lesson is the one this data keeps proving. The national average said prices rose 2.8%. In Padstow they fell 38%. No average, however carefully calculated, tells you what your home is worth. Only the market on your street does.

How we did this

We used HM Land Registry Price Paid Data for England, full calendar years 2023 and 2025, restricted to standard open-market residential sales (categories D, S, T and F, price paid category A, excluding deletions). The twenty towns are Salcombe, Dartmouth, Padstow, St Ives, Fowey, Woolacombe, Southwold, Aldeburgh, Wells-next-the-Sea, Cromer, Sheringham, Windermere, Ambleside, Keswick, Whitby, Swanage, Lyme Regis, Seahouses, Ventnor and Bude. Both years are complete in the published data. Medians are used throughout rather than means, so a handful of very large sales cannot distort the result.

Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.