A borough average can help frame a property search, but it cannot tell an investor what a particular home will earn. ONS local housing pages updated on 21 October 2026 illustrate why price and rent evidence need to be kept in context.
The five borough benchmarks
The following pairings show the provisional average house price for August 2026 and average monthly private rent for September 2026:
Ealing: £590,000 and £2,126. Hackney: £619,000 and £2,667. Greenwich: £463,000 and £1,998. Harrow: £532,000 and £1,781. Merton: £624,000 and £2,181.
The house-price and rental series describe different markets and observation periods. They are not a matched set of properties bought and let by the same owner. Dividing one borough-wide average into the other would therefore not verify a promised investment yield.
Look beneath the borough total
For a real purchase, compare the same type of home in the same part of the borough. Separate flats from houses and check bedrooms, condition, tenure and building costs. A lower acquisition price does not establish that the rental demand, condition or ongoing expenditure will be comparable.
Build a shortlist of actual evidence. Record when a comparable home sold or was advertised, what its description includes and why it is relevant to the property being considered. Keep asking rents separate from evidence of agreed rents, and do not treat an average as a valuation of a particular street.
Check the dates and revisions
ONS cautions that local data use smaller samples than national estimates and short-term movements can be variable. House-price estimates are revised, and the figures shown are not seasonally adjusted. The values above are a dated snapshot rather than live quotations.
A practical investment assessment needs a separate cost model. Include acquisition costs, finance, maintenance, management, insurance, service charges where relevant and possible periods without rent. Show the assumptions explicitly and test how a change would affect cash flow. Market averages cannot answer those questions for an individual owner.
Use the benchmark to ask better questions
The useful outcome is a clearer research plan: which homes to compare, what evidence is missing and which costs need checking. These figures do not rank the boroughs as good or bad investments, and any claimed return still needs property-specific evidence and a clearly stated calculation.
Sources: ONS Housing prices in Ealing, Hackney, Greenwich, Harrow and Merton, updated 21 October 2026. Checked 8 November 2026.