Back in the early months of Covid lockdowns, all the talk in property circles was of would-be housebuyers plotting a move to coastal and rural areas as city dwellers prioritised a bigger garden, access to nature and more room for home working.
But, five years on, the reshaping of the housing market sparked by the pandemic has gone into reverse, with homes by the sea seemingly losing some of their lustre and fewer people looking to escape from cities, data shows.
The property website Rightmove said that, while much had changed since 2020, one constant was a desire among many would-be buyers for a home with more space.
Spool back to early 2020, and among the areas estate agents were naming as the new property hotspots were locations such as Port Isaac in Cornwall, Margate in Kent, Clevedon in north Somerset, the East Neuk of Fife on Scotland’s east coast, and Canford Cliffs, a suburb of Poole in Dorset.
Rightmove said that in 2025, “many short-term trends brought about by the unique circumstances of lockdown have reversed”.
It added: “Coastal homes are taking longer to find buyers, and price growth has stabilised as more supply has come on to the market – some likely from movers heading back to the city. At the same time, fewer people are looking to escape cities as life has returned to normal and the debate continues about remote versus office working.”
Discussions about where you should be allowed to work from have become increasingly heated as a growing number of employers demand that staff attend the workplace more often, which has big implications for where people live.
Rightmove said that by March 2021 Cornwall had overtaken London as the most searched-for area on the website for the first time. At the same time, under half (47%) of potential homebuyers in London were looking to stay in the capital, down from 59% a year earlier.
Things look very different now: London is once again the most searched-for location on the website, and the majority (58%) of people living there are looking to stay rather than to leave.
Homes near the sea are now taking longer to sell compared with the period immediately after the start of the pandemic. In coastal areas, the time it takes to find a buyer has gone up from an average of 52 days then to 73 days now.
In addition, house price growth in coastal locations has cooled. Looking at a sample of more than 100 areas, Rightmove found that the average asking price for a home near the sea increased by 4.5% during the first year of the pandemic, well ahead of the average for the country as a whole.
But now, the latest average annual increase for coastal areas is 1%, in line with the rest of Britain.
A few weeks into the pandemic, the estate agent Savills said the mass switch to working from home had proved that “you don’t need to be in London, or another city, five days a week”.
However, research has previously indicated that some who bought during or just after the pandemic later suffered buyer’s remorse: a 2022 survey of those who moved during this period found that 12% believed they rushed into the decision and now regretted it, while a further 15% were not happy and were considering moving again.
A separate study last year suggested that some of these movers subsequently sold up and moved back to the suburbs or city.
In the immediate wake of the pandemic, many people saw the home working revolution as a potential opportunity to pursue a new or different lifestyle, often away from traditional town and city centres, said Nathan Emerson, the chief executive of the estate agent body Propertymark.
But, he added, with lots of employers now wanting their staff to be based in centralised office locations, many people “are choosing metropolitan areas once again, where there are likely better transport links and a more competitive jobs market in many cases”.
Rightmove also said that over the past five years, semi-detached and detached houses had seen bigger price rises than flats, suggesting that “there is still a premium for having more space”.
Meanwhile, the keywords that buyers have been using in their search for a home – such as “garage” and “annexe” – have largely stayed the same, and relate to having more space.
