Last week I wrote about six ways buying a home in England works differently than in Oregon. I’m still here, and the follow-up question is: forget the process, what does the money actually buy? So I ran the numbers, London against Portland, and then the version I find more interesting, the towns an hour outside each city. The house is Hobb’s Farm, the home my mother grew up in. Once a four acre working farm property, the house now sits on a small parcel with a subdivision behind it. It was built in 1690! Eighty-six years before America declared its independence. My great grandfather commuted daily, by train, to London from there.
All conversions below use roughly $1.33 to the pound, which is where the exchange rate sit now, in early July.
The headline numbers
The official UK House Price Index puts the average London home at £553,000, call it $735,000. Portland’s year-to-date median through May is $540,000 per RMLS. So London runs about 36 percent more than Portland. Given London’s reputation, you might have expected worse.
Then you look at what the money buys, and the gap blows wide open.
The square footage problem
The median London sale runs about £622 per square foot. That’s roughly $827. A typical Portland resale, using our $540,000 median against the modest 1,800 square feet of an average existing American home, pencils out somewhere around $300 per square foot. Treat that as a rough illustration rather than a precise stat, but the shape of it is right: per square foot, London costs well over twice what Portland does.
That’s because the homes are small. The average UK dwelling is about 1,033 square feet. The average UK apartment is 656. The average existing American home is around 1,800, and new construction here runs 2,300. So the London buyer pays 36 percent more money for roughly half the house. That is the actual price gap.
Put it in concrete terms. Take Portland’s median, $540,000, and fly it to London. It converts to about £406,000, which is below the citywide average and buys a flat, likely one or two bedrooms depending on the postcode, quite possibly a leasehold with a service charge attached. That same $540,000 in Portland is the median: a house, a yard, a garage, and nobody above or below you.
An hour out of town: the part I find most interesting
Here’s where it gets fun. England has a whole ecosystem of commuter towns about an hour from London, the same way Salem sits about an hour down I-5 from Portland. The comparison is almost too neat. Whereas we commute by car, British Rail is the mode of transportation used by most.
Colchester, about 50 minutes from London by train, averages £300,000, or about $400,000. Basingstoke, 47 minutes out, averages £372,000, about $495,000. Salem’s median sale price this year is running around $455,000. In raw dollars, Salem and the English commuter belt are practically the same market.
What the money buys is not the same. The Colchester average is pulled down by flats and terraced houses, the row homes that make up much of English housing stock. A detached house with a garden, what a Salem buyer would consider simply “a house,” carries a hefty premium there. In Salem, $455,000 is a detached three-bedroom with a yard, and you didn’t fight anyone for the parking.
The discount curve is different too. Colchester sits 46 percent below the London average. Salem sits about 16 percent below Portland’s median. Leaving London buys you enormous relief. Leaving Portland buys you some. Part of that is Portland being far cheaper to start with, and part is that Salem isn’t a bedroom community at all. It’s the state capital with its own employment base and its own market rhythm. It doesn’t need Portland the way Colchester needs London.
The St Albans twist
Before anyone concludes distance equals discount, England offers a counterexample. St Albans, 20 minutes from central London by fast train, averages £633,000. That’s $842,000, more than London itself. A pretty cathedral city with a quick commute costs more than the capital it feeds. Portland has its own versions of the close-in premium suburb, as anyone who has shopped Lake Oswego against the Portland median can confirm. Some things translate across the Atlantic just fine.
Don’t forget the taxes stack on top
Last week I mentioned Stamp Duty. Here’s what it does to these numbers. On that average £553,000 London purchase, a main-residence buyer owes about £17,650 in Stamp Duty, roughly $23,500, due at closing, on top of everything else. The Oregon equivalent is essentially zero. Washington County charges its small transfer fee and the rest of the state charges nothing. The sticker price gap between London and Portland understates the real gap.
What it means for you
Same answer as last week: probably nothing, directly. But context is worth something. Portland’s median has been soft for a year and it’s easy to read our market as expensive and stuck. Set it next to a global city and the picture shifts: twice the house per dollar, no transfer tax to speak of, and a fixed mortgage rate the English buyer can only envy.
To be fair to London, this isn’t a clean apples-to-apples win. London salaries and global capital chase those small flats for reasons that have nothing to do with the Willamette Valley. But if you own a home in Portland or Salem, you hold an asset that delivers more actual living space per dollar than almost any comparable city an English buyer would recognize. That’s not spin. That’s the arithmetic.
Questions about what this means for your situation? We’re happy to walk through it.
Sources: London and UK averages from the UK House Price Index, April 2026; commuter town figures (March 2026 UK HPI data) via HouseCheckup’s 2026 commuter town analysis; London price per square foot via Numbeo/Investropa 2026 estimates; Portland figures from the RMLS Market Action Report — Portland Metro, May 2026; Salem median sale price via Redfin market data (note: WVMLS captures more of the Salem market than any single portal). Exchange rate of $1.33/£ as of early July 2026. All converted figures rounded.