The typical Kendal home sold for £249,000 last year, against £385,000 in the Lakes parish. Land Registry sales by parish, with prices by property type.

The middle home sale in Kendal over the last twelve months was £249,000. In the Lakes parish, which covers Ambleside, Grasmere and Elterwater, it was £385,000. That £136,000 gap between a market town and the villages beside the water is the most useful thing anyone can tell you about buying here.

Everything below comes from completed sales recorded by HM Land Registry, pulled for the twelve months to 30 June 2026 and matched to a civil parish rather than reported by postcode district. That matters: LA6 and LA7 spill into Lancaster and North Yorkshire, and LA8 covers a huge rural spread that is nothing like the town. Asking prices are not used anywhere on this page.

What homes sold for, parish by parish

Median home sale price by parish around Kendal Horizontal bar chart of median completed home sale prices by civil parish, July 2025 to June 2026. Natland is highest at £405,000 from 21 sales, then Lakes at £385,000 from 53 sales, Lower Allithwaite at £377,500 from 32 sales, Windermere and Bowness at £335,000 from 105 sales, Burton-in-Kendal at £310,000 from 21 sales, Grange-over-Sands at £268,000 from 75 sales, Kirkby Lonsdale at £262,750 from 21 sales, Kendal at £249,000 from 440 sales, Milnthorpe at £242,000 from 30 sales and Lower Holker at £214,500 from 22 sales. Kendal is cheaper than the lake parishes and the villages nearest to it Median price of completed home sales by civil parish, 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026. Parishes with at least 20 sales. Source: HM Land Registry Price Paid data. Natland£405,000 (21) Lakes (Ambleside, Grasmere)£385,000 (53) Lower Allithwaite (Cartmel)£377,500 (32) Windermere and Bowness£335,000 (105) Burton-in-Kendal£310,000 (21) Grange-over-Sands£268,000 (75) Kirkby Lonsdale£262,750 (21) Kendal£249,000 (440 sales) Milnthorpe£242,000 (30) Lower Holker (Flookburgh)£214,500 (22) Kendal alone accounts for 440 of the 1,105 sales in this data. Parishes with fewer than about 20 sales swing on a single house and are left off this chart.
Natland, the parish immediately south of Kendal, has the highest median here at £405,000. It is also where 491 new homes are proposed.

Two things stand out. The lake parishes carry a clear premium: Windermere and Bowness at £335,000, Lakes at £385,000, Coniston at £382,500 from 14 sales. All three sit inside the Lake District National Park, where planning is tight, holiday letting competes with residents for the same stock and second-home buyers arrive with money made elsewhere.

The second is that the small parishes ringing Kendal are dearer than the town. Natland’s median is £405,000, Levens £357,500 from 14 sales, Heversham £430,000 from just 10. Kendal at £249,000 is not the cheapest place in this data, but it is the cheapest place of any size, and it is where nearly all the transactions happen.

Kendal by property type

Within Kendal parish, the spread by type is wide. These are medians for the same twelve months:

  • Detached: £378,000 (81 sales). The town’s ceiling for an ordinary family home.
  • Semi-detached: £261,000 (140 sales). The most-traded type in Kendal, and the one that best describes “a Kendal house”.
  • Terraced: £227,500 (128 sales). The limestone and slate terraces off Highgate and the roads down to the river.
  • Flats and maisonettes: £144,000 (91 sales). The cheapest entry point in the area by a wide margin.

A flat in Kendal at £144,000 against £202,000 in Windermere and Bowness and £321,875 in the Lakes parish is the starkest number on this page. If you want to buy your first property and stay in the south Lakes, Kendal is realistically where you do it.

Why the council figure is not your figure

Search for house prices here and you will be shown £227,987, the average for the whole Westmorland and Furness council area in May 2026, up 6.8% on the year, from the UK House Price Index. That number is technically correct and locally misleading.

Westmorland and Furness was created in April 2023 by merging South Lakeland, Eden and Barrow-in-Furness. Barrow is an industrial shipbuilding town with a housing market that has nothing in common with Windermere, and Eden reaches up to Penrith and Appleby. The council average blends all three, so it sits below the Kendal median and far below every lake parish.

For a sense of the direction of travel, the council-wide index puts detached homes at £388,027, semis at £247,289, terraces at £184,591 and flats at £132,303. Compare those with the Kendal figures above and the distortion is visible: Kendal terraces and flats sell well above the unitary average.

Which way prices are moving

On the council-wide index, prices rose 6.8% in the year to May 2026 and 1.7% in that month alone. That is well ahead of England as a whole, which managed 2.3%, and ahead of the North West at 5.8%. Neighbouring Cumberland rose 6.2%.

The rise is broad rather than flat-driven. Detached homes are up 7.1%, semis 7.5% and terraces 7.2%, while flats and maisonettes have added just 2.4%. The region is also catching up from a low base, which is what a £228,000 average against a £292,095 England average tells you.

First-time buyers

The UK House Price Index puts the average first-time-buyer purchase across Westmorland and Furness at £191,021, up 6.8% on the year, against £271,506 for former owner-occupiers. In Kendal specifically, the £144,000 median flat and the £227,500 median terrace are the two rungs that exist. In the national park parishes there is very little at those prices at all.

If you are buying, the running costs matter as much as the price. Flood risk is worth checking here: the Kendal Flood Risk Management Scheme exists because 2,276 properties in the town were hit in December 2015, and the defences are still being built.

How to read these numbers carefully

  • Parish, not postcode. Every sale here was matched to a civil parish through its full postcode. Of the 1,105 home sales in the eight postcode districts we pulled, 77 were not in Westmorland and Furness at all: 43 in Lancaster district and 34 in North Yorkshire, dragged in by the LA6 and LA7 postcodes that straddle the county boundary. A raw postcode-district table would have counted every one of them as local.
  • Small parishes swing. Coniston’s £382,500 comes from 14 sales, Heversham’s £430,000 from 10. One large house moves them, which is why the chart above only shows parishes with at least 20.
  • The last two months are under-counted. Sales take weeks to register, so the most recent window always looks thinner than it will once complete.
  • Outliers are real but rare. The highest home sale in this data was £4,500,000 in Crook, followed by £3,250,000 in Windermere and Bowness and £2,050,000 in the Lakes parish. None of them tells you what an ordinary home costs.
  • Commercial sales are excluded. Only detached, semi-detached, terraced and flat or maisonette transactions are counted. The single largest price in the raw data, £13.5 million in the Lakes parish, was an “other” property type and is in none of the figures here.

Where these figures come from

Sale-by-sale prices are HM Land Registry Price Paid records for the twelve months to 30 June 2026, covering the LA6 to LA9 and LA11, LA21, LA22 and LA23 postcode districts, with every full postcode matched to a district and parish through the postcodes.io lookup. All 1,208 sales matched on the first pass, with none left unclassified. The council-level averages and annual changes are from the UK House Price Index for Westmorland and Furness, area code E06000064, latest month May 2026.

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