'This seaside town is Devon's Dubai - there's nowhere in the UK like it'

A quaint seaside town, often referred to as 'Devon's Dubai', has seen a significant property boom, earning it its new nickname.

Salcombe, also known as Chelsea-on-Sea, surged in popularity during the Covid pandemic when remote working became the new normal and people opted to ditch the busyness of the city for a slower pace of life near the British coast.

Blair Stewart from Strutt and Parker revealed that at one point, he was selling properties for an astonishing £2,000 per square foot in Salcombe - a price comparable to that in Knightsbridge, London.

"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 gold rush. Everybody was trying to bail out of London and they came down here on holiday and woke up to how beautiful it is," he told the Daily Mail.

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"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."

In 2023 and 2024, Salcombe took the title of the most expensive seaside town in the UK, even surpassing the renowned Sandbanks in Dorset, reports the Express.

In 2022, the average house price in the area was roughly £1.2 million. However, over the last year, this figure has dropped to £816,303.

Detached properties sold for an average of £923,115 and flats for £853,147, according to data from Rightmove.

This represents a significant decrease of 18% from the previous year and 35% from the peak in 2022.

Charlie Heath, associate director at Marchant Pettit based in Salcombe, commented: "We had an extraordinary uplift in prices from 2020 to 2023, the equivalent normally would've been spread out over five to six years."

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