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Name: Britain’s most desirable home.
Age: Newly crowned.
Appearance: Let’s go with “deceptively spacious”.
Deceptively spacious? But that’s estate agent code for “tiny”. That’s because the home in question is not as big as you’d have thought. It’s a fairly ordinary-sized detached house in the Welsh countryside. Pencader, Carmarthenshire, to be precise.
What’s the sell? Well, it has two bedrooms, although you could partition off the landing to create a third if you wanted. It costs £230,000 – £40,000 less than the average British home.
It sounds like a good buy, but is it really Britain’s most desirable home? In a manner of speaking: more people viewed the listing than any other this year.
And how do we know this? Because Zoopla has used all the data it has gathered to offer a snapshot of how we view homes.
Wait, they’ve Spotify Wrapped the housing market now? Yes, but with Zoopla your children are less likely to hijack your account and skew the results.
What did we learn from this report? For one, Zoopla estimates that there will be approximately 1.15m sales by the end of 2025, up 4.5% on the previous year.
But hang on, people don’t just flock to property listings because the houses are desirable. No, I know. They flock to them because they’re horribly decorated, famous in some capacity (the most popular listing across Zoopla’s social media was a terrace home in Barry, which belonged to Doris from Gavin & Stacey) or the scene of a recent crime. But in this case, it really does seem that people just want to live somewhere affordable and rural.
Boring! You’ll be pleased to know that the second most-viewed property this year was much more unusual. It was a six-bedroom villa next to Glasgow Prestwick airport, that came with 4.5 hectares (11 acres) of land and a floodlit football pitch, and cost £1.8m.
Ah, unaffordable property searches, the nation’s favourite hobby. There are some crackers in the rest of the top 10, too. A £75,000 studio in Strathy Point lighthouse. A well-appointed character property near Troon for £220,000. A stately five-bedroom house within reach of Loch Lomond, £800,000.
Why are so many of them Scottish? That’s easy. Scotland is a beautiful place to live. Lots of space, lots of fresh air.
Anything else? I mean, it’s also a lot cheaper. The average price of a home in Scotland this year was £194,000, about £80,000 cheaper than a home in England.
That’s huge. The disparity is even bigger if you live in Kensington and Chelsea, where the average home now sells for £1,071,600. It’s also worth mentioning that prescriptions are free in Scotland, and there aren’t any tuition fees there.
So everyone should move to Scotland? Yes, I’m sure all the Scottish people would love to be invaded by bargain hunters determined to gentrify the place beyond recognition.
Do say: “The most desirable home in the UK costs £230,000.”
Don’t say: “Let’s buy it and rent it out at an extortionate rate.”
