House prices fell in the first three months of the year, according to Land Registry figures.
The average price of a house or flat in Brighton and Hove fell 2.5 per cent to £216,669 from £222,242 in the final quarter of last tear.
The figure was 0.3 per cent higher though than the average price a year previously but 7 per cent down on the peak price of £235,939 in the November 2009.
The figures were published on the Brighton Business website run by the Business Forum and the Economic Partnership in Brighton and Hove.
The figures show that the 0.3 per cent rise in average prices over the past year in Brighton and Hove came as prices nationally fell 2.3 per cent.
Brighton Business said that prices locally were 35 per cent higher than the average for England and Wales.
And despite the quarterly fall, first-time buyers would need an annual income of £38,000 and a £41,000 deposit just to buy a starter flat at an average price of £166,000.
Separate research supports the official Land Registry indication that the property market in Brighton and Hove is more buoyant than in many other parts of the country.
The Mortgage Rates website attributes this in part to Londoners escaping to the coast for a quieter life.
The website said that it had identified the top 50 postcodes for the number of houses and flats sold from January 2010 to January 2011.
It said that it had conducted a poll of estate agents and found Brighton and Hove’s had had a busy spell, reporting more than 1,500 transactions in 14 months.
The Land Registry recorded 4,265 sales in total in 2010.
The Mortgage Rates website said that the average was 291 sales per postcode across the country as a whole.
It said: “The seaside resort was hard hit during the early part of the recession but has appeared to have been one of the best to recover.”
And it quoted Alex Mackay, managing director of Mishon Mackay, as saying: “Our figures show that 35 per cent of all our sales in quarter one were to London buyers, double what it was at the same time last year.
“Although I don’t think this is necessarily a trend, we are focused on the London market.”
I wonder how many of these new residents are downsizers, cashing in on high London prices while they can and buying a retirement home here that leaves them with a nest-egg in the bank?
I wonder how many are people coming down from London to start a family AND COMMUTE? These people will suffer from major hikes to rail fares.
If Brighton is a refuge for escaping Londoners (as it was for me years ago)seeking to be somewhere Londonish if they can’t stay in London, then the city is not embraced for what is truly offers and initially these people will want Brighton & Hove to be MORE like London.
The city is probably overpopulated now by incomers who don’t change their way of being to become provincials and love being that. Instead the city takes years and years to get used to (if one is a Londoner) and the city has become like a transit camp or airport lounge in many ways – full of incomers without deep roots or knowledge of the area to bring with them.
It makes for a certain messiness and an insubstantial quality that is not about “fitting in”.
I say this with some degree of hindsight; and my own experience of taking several years to stop referencing London for everything. And indeed to give any time at all to locally produced media. But that was then and this is now and maybe incomers now get well stuck into being ‘local’. Why does that NOT have the ring of truth to it………