Property prices in Preston

We publish a twelve month average for Preston whenever enough sales complete to be fair, and leave it out rather than print a thin figure.

We publish the five year comparison wherever the price series holds enough sales to make it fair.

Preston is a Lancashire city with a large university and a rental market split between shared houses and family homes. Entry prices remain low for the north west.

The type of home matters more than almost anything else in Preston, so the table shows the twelve month average for each type we hold enough sales for. The number of sales behind each figure is shown beside it, so you can see how firm it is before you lean on it.

The table below is the price series our data supplier holds for the area, one row a year, with the movement across each year beside it. It is the same series the valuation on your own report is anchored against, which is why a report can say what your home is worth today from what it sold for years ago.

A trend is a description of the past, not a promise. What it is genuinely useful for is a sanity check: if the price you are being asked to pay assumes a rise the last five years never delivered, you are buying someone else's optimism.

District matters twice over for a landlord: it sets what you pay and it sets what you can charge. The districts below are the Preston postcode areas with enough homes advertised to give a fair rental average, which is the side of the sum most buyers guess at.

Put the two halves together before you buy: the rent a district actually achieves against the price a district actually commands. That is the yield, and it is the only number that tells you whether a purchase works.

Yield is a year of rent measured against what the home is worth, so it belongs to your property rather than to Preston.

Gross yield is not what you keep. Out of it come management, safety certificates, insurance, repairs and any empty weeks between tenants. The report on your own address sets the rent it can achieve against what the home is worth, so you are looking at your property rather than an area.

If you already own here and want the running of it taken off your hands, the management page for Preston sets out what a high street agent charges on the area's real average rent against what Caso charges for the same work.