The sleepy UK seaside town of Salcombe has been nicknamed “Devon’s Dubai” after experiencing a major property boom. Also known as Chelsea-on-Sea, the posh town started gaining popularity during the Covid pandemic when people were forced to work from home and decided to move out of cities.
Blair Stewart from Strutt and Parker said he was selling properties for £2,000 per square foot at one point – the same price as in Knightsbridge. He told the Daily Mail: “When Covid hit it turned everything on its head. It was a feeding frenzy. I was doing 50% of my sales before the property ever hit the market. It was a surge, a massive influx of new buyers and it became like a goldrush. Everybody was trying to bail out of London and they came down here on holiday and woke up to how beautiful it is.
“The market was already really strong for second homes and we saw a 25% price jump in 2020.
“We had well-known people coming down by helicopter. I’d pick them up and drive them around to view places and nobody ever spotted them walking along the street.
“I don’t know anywhere else in the UK that experienced a situation like this, the nearest thing I can compare it to is the property buzz in Dubai when I worked there.”
Salcombe was named the most expensive seaside town in the UK in 2023 and 2024, beating the famous Sandbanks in Dorset.
In 2022, average house prices in the area were roughly £1.2 million. Over the last year, however, the number dropped to £816,303.
Detached properties sold for an average of £923,115 and flats for £853,147, according to Rightmove data. This is a significant decrease of 18% from the previous year and 35% from the 2022 peak.
Charlie Heath, associate director at Marchant Pettit and based in Salcombe, added: “We had an extraordinary uplift in prices from 2020 to 2023, the equivalent normally would’ve been spread out over five to six years.”