Here’s what £300,000 will get you compared with 10 years ago

When we last looked at what £300,000 could buy, back in March 2011, you could snag yourself three parking places in Mayfair. Now, you’re down to just one, albeit in Knightsbridge.

Ten years ago, the £300,000 properties we featured in these pages that were for sale in our area included a five-bedroom house just off Cold Bath Road in Harrogate and a seven-bedroom doer-upper in Kirk Hammerton.

To say you’d be lucky to find deals like those today is something of an understatement – it would be completely impossible. Back then, the average house price was £270,000, whereas it’s now more than 25 per cent higher, at over £338,000, according to Rightmove.

If you split the difference and look for a relatively (we use the word with caution) affordable property, priced at or below £300,000, you can still find plenty to look at, but the ones off Cold Bath Road will be flats with one, two or (at a pinch) three bedrooms, and the houses elsewhere won’t have seven bedrooms – doer-uppers or not.

Yet there are still some very nice properties out there for this amount, or thereabouts. What’s more, if you’re a first-time buyer in England or Northern Ireland, you won’t pay any stamp duty on homes priced at £300,000 or less.

The following properties are three of the best houses currently available for around the £300,000 mark.

In Ripon, 35 Princess Road is an end-of-terrace Victorian house that is far more spacious than it appears from the kerbside.

On the top floor is the master bedroom, which has an en suite shower room and balcony to the rear of the house, and there are three other bedrooms, two of them doubles, on the first floor.

On the ground floor there’s a kitchen, dining room, living room and hall, and in the converted cellar there are two more rooms that are currently used as a family/cinema room and study; plumbing is also in place to add a toilet. The back garden includes a shed, wendy house, and an idyllic seating area under a pergola, and there’s also a carport and off-street parking.

In Darley, 3 Stocks Green is a stone-built period terraced cottage, complete with beams and wood-burner. It has three bedrooms – one of them a single – bathroom, kitchen, dining room and lounge.

Outside, there’s a beautiful garden to the front, and to the rear, a small private patio seating area which backs onto fields and has fantastic views over the Nidderdale countryside beyond.

In Wetherby, 38 Grasmere Drive is a more modern mid-terrace house on a quiet cul-de-sac in the Lakes development, just off Spofforth Hill.

It has an en suite master bedroom in the converted loft, two further bedrooms and a house bathroom on the first floor, and, on the ground floor, a sitting room and an open-plan dining room and kitchen, which opens out onto the patio. Outside, there are also front and back gardens, as well as allocated parking.