Weston-super-Mare: identical house prices, a 70-point EPC gap

Two postcode districts on opposite sides of Weston-super-Mare sold houses for almost exactly the same money in 2025 — and rate almost nothing alike on energy efficiency. BS23 4, running back from the seafront toward the town centre, had a median sale price of £275,000 across 140 transactions. BS24 7, three miles east on the edge of the town, had a median of £272,000 across 222 transactions — a gap of just £3,000, or 1.1%. But of the homes in each area with a live Energy Performance Certificate, only 18.6% of BS23 4's rate C or above, against 88.5% in BS24 7. That's a 70-point difference in energy rating between two areas selling houses for the same price.

The obvious guess is that BS24 7 is simply a better-built, newer part of town. HM Land Registry and EPC Open Data confirm that's almost the whole story — but not quite all of it.

Two sectors, one price band, opposite ratings

Source: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data (category A, houses and flats, sales completed 1 January–31 December 2025) matched against EPC Open Data, fetched 29 September 2026.

The gap is almost entirely about when the homes were built

EPC ratings track building fabric — insulation, glazing, heating system — which is set overwhelmingly by the year a property was built and tightened at each revision of the Building Regulations. BS23 4's certified stock is 44.8% pre-1930 (599 of 1,338 certificates), the Victorian and Edwardian terraces and villas typical of a Victorian seaside town centre. BS24 7 has almost none of that: just 2 pre-1930 certificates out of 3,380. Instead, 69.3% of BS24 7's certified stock (2,342 of 3,380) was either built from 2003 onward or carries an unrecorded age band typical of recently registered new-build EPCs — against 1.5% in BS23 4 (20 of 1,338).

That imbalance makes a truly fair comparison hard: BS24 7 barely has an "old Weston" of its own to test against BS23 4's. But two build-era bands have enough certificates on both sides (30 or more) to compare directly, and the result is telling:

Homes built between 1991 and 2002 rate identically in both places — 70.0% C-or-above whichever side of town they're on. Homes from the 1950s and 60s show a real but modest gap (31.7% versus 43.5%). Neither comes close to the 70-point headline difference. The overwhelming majority of that gap exists because BS24 7 simply doesn't contain much pre-1990s housing stock to drag its average down, not because a given house performs differently depending on which postcode it sits in.

Checked at scale: does the pattern hold across the wider area?

A two-sector comparison risks being a coincidence of which streets happen to carry EPCs. So the same test was repeated across all four central/seafront BS23 sectors (BS23 1–4, 11,485 addresses) against North Somerset Council's two most new-build-heavy Weston sectors, BS24 7 and BS24 8 (6,025 addresses) — where certificate coverage is much fuller (80.5%, against 44.3% in BS23) and the comparison covers 99.6% of the newer area's certified stock rather than a partial slice.

The wider result: BS23 rates 25.8% C-or-above (1,311 of 5,084 certificates); the two BS24 sectors rate 85.5% (4,143 of 4,848) — a 59.7-point gap. Formally decomposing that gap by build era (the same method used in Homecost's earlier Bristol BS13 and North Somerset coastal-towns analyses) attributes 50.7 points of it — about 85% — to the two areas simply containing homes from different eras. Only 8.9 points, roughly 15%, is a genuine difference in how similarly-aged homes perform once location is held constant.

EPC ratings reflect the certificate's assessed energy band, not a live utility bill — see how EPC ratings are calculated for the full methodology.

What it doesn't change: the buying cost

Because BS23 4 and BS24 7 fall in the same council area, the running cost that EPC bands are often used as a proxy for — energy — is the one thing that varies here; council tax does not. North Somerset's Band D rate for 2026–27 is £2,491.22 regardless of which sector a home sits in.

The purchase-cost side is close to a wash too. At each area's 2025 median:

*75% loan-to-value, 25-year term, at the Bank of England's quoted mortgage rate of 4.92% as of 31 August 2026. Actual rates depend on the lender, deposit and borrower's credit profile.

Both areas sit under England's £300,000 first-time buyer nil-rate threshold, so neither buyer pays stamp duty on a first purchase at these medians. The £13-a-month difference in an illustrative repayment is negligible next to a 70-point EPC gap — which is exactly why build era, not price, is the more useful thing to check before ruling an area in or out on energy grounds.

For a fuller picture of house prices across Weston-super-Mare's other sectors, see Weston-super-Mare's price ladder by property type, and for the surrounding coastal towns, North Somerset's coastal towns compared. To check any individual property's price history, EPC rating and estimated running costs, search a postcode such as BS24 7AH directly. More data-led comparisons like this one are in Homecost's market analysis section.

This analysis draws on 17,510 residential addresses and 9,932 matched EPC certificates across North Somerset's BS23 and BS24 postcode sectors, 362 HM Land Registry sales completed in 2025 in the two headline postcode districts, and North Somerset's 2026-27 council tax rate.

Speak to a qualified adviser before acting on any stamp duty or mortgage figure — actual costs depend on individual circumstances.