House prices rise 5% in Harlow but fall 3% next door

Research by ValuQ: we pulled the latest HM Land Registry UK House Price Index figures for all 14 Essex council areas on 12 June 2026 and ranked them by annual price change.

How far apart are Essex house prices right now?

Essex as a county looks becalmed. The official average is £357,476 and the annual change is +0.1%, which reads like a market doing nothing at all. The county number is hiding a divide. Four Essex areas are falling. Five are growing by more than 2%. And the fastest riser and the fastest faller in the whole county sit next to each other on the map.

The gap from top to bottom is 8.7 percentage points in a single year. On these averages, a typical Harlow home gained roughly £16,000 over the year while a typical Epping Forest home lost more than £18,000. The two districts share a border.

It is not a simple case of cheap areas rising and expensive areas falling, either. Harlow is the most affordable London-line district in west Essex and leads the county, and the two most expensive areas, Brentwood and Epping Forest, are moving in opposite directions at +2.5% and -3.4%. Meanwhile Tendring, the cheapest area in Essex, is falling too. Each local market is running on its own logic.

Why is the gap between neighbouring districts so wide?

A district average moves when the mix of what actually sells changes, even when individual homes have not changed value at all. An area where affordable family homes are selling briskly to buyers priced out of London can post strong growth while a neighbouring area, where the market leans on larger and more expensive homes, posts a fall as that end of the market goes quiet. District-level figures are also built on fewer sales than national ones, so they swing harder. The honest reading is not that every Harlow home rose 5.3% and every Epping Forest home fell 3.4%. It is that no county or national average can tell you what happened to your street.

Fourteen council areas, one county, and a nine point spread in a single year. The number that matters to a seller is not the national average or even the county average. It is what homes like yours, on streets like yours, are actually selling for. Start from that evidence, then get more than one professional opinion on it. Evren Ergin, founder of ValuQ.

What does this mean if you are selling in Essex?

• Ignore the headline averages when pricing. The Essex average of +0.1% describes nobody: not a Harlow seller in a rising market, not an Epping Forest seller in a falling one.
• Ask every agent who values your home for sold comparables from your own postcode, dated within the last six months. In a market this divided, evidence from the next district along can point you thousands of pounds wrong.
• Get more than one valuation before you commit. ValuQ gives UK homeowners free, side-by-side property valuations from competing local estate agents, so the realistic number for your specific home is easy to see before you choose anyone.
• If your area is on the falling side of the table, realistic pricing from day one matters even more. Overpricing in a softening market costs the first and best weeks of buyer interest.

How we did this

ValuQ pulled the UK House Price Index, the official measure built from completed sales and published by HM Land Registry, for every one of the 14 Essex council areas (12 districts plus the unitary authorities of Southend-on-Sea and Thurrock) via the Land Registry open data service on 12 June 2026. The latest published month is March 2026, released on 20 May 2026. Annual change compares March 2026 with March 2025. The figures are HM Land Registry's own. The ranking and the comparison are ValuQ analysis. Contains HM Land Registry data, Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.