Stamp duty-free London property: where to find homes for less than the £300,000 tax threshold for first-time buyers

London house price rises make searching for anything to buy for less than £200,000 a fool’s errand — but latest research reveals that flats priced under £300,000 have all but disappeared in and around the capital.

Nationally, the average house price is £215,368. Yet only six out of more than 200 postcode districts in London saw a home sold for less than £300,000 this year, according to the analysis from agents Hamptons International.

Those postcodes were all in east or south-east London and included Thamesmead in SE28, Dagenham, Becontree RM9, Barking IG11, Belvedere, Lessness Heath DA17, Erith DA8 and Dartford DA1.

The £300,000 level is seen as significant because it marks the threshold for stamp duty for first-time buyers.

Across London as a whole, only 17 per cent of homes that sold last year and this year fell within this category, compared with 61 per cent 10 years ago.

Across England and Wales as a whole, two thirds of properties sold at the beginning of last year changed hands for less than £300,000.

Only one per cent of homes that were sold in exclusive Holland Park W8 and Chiswick W4 fell into the sub-£300,000 bracket.

Aneisha Beveridge, head of research at Hamptons, reports that the high price growth of the last 10 years is slowing, but says homes under £300,000 are becoming scarce.

“It is still a significant amount of money if you think of buyers having to come up with a 10 per cent deposit,” she says. “That’s not far off the average salary in London and that’s a lot to save up.”

But it is apparently still worth searching next door to a high-priced location. Aneisha says: “In more expensive boroughs there are still some relatively central pockets where houses are being sold for under £300,000.

“For example the average price of a home in Hammersmith & Fulham is £717,020 but if you look in the W12 Shepherd’s Bush postcode, one in 10 sales was for less than £300,000.”