Oh, to be an estate agent on Easter Saturday in Salcombe! Elsewhere in the country, the property market might have slumped, but the craggy cliffs that conceal this dreamy Devonian cove are impervious to such blips.

So, as the spring selling season kicks off, Theo Spink’s diary is chock-full with viewings. 

‘Whenever anyone asks me when’s a good time to buy in Salcombe, I tell them straight — it’s always a good time to buy in Salcombe,’ laughs the town’s answer to Kirstie Allsopp, confidently predicting that she’ll have wrapped up at least one more seven-figure deal before the weekend’s over.

No one could accuse Theo of spinning her prospective clients the sort of yarn that earns some members of her profession an unflattering reputation. 

Over the past decade, house prices in the resort have risen exponentially and between 2021 and 2022 alone the average soared by an astonishing 33 per cent, to £1,244,025, winning Salcombe the questionable accolade of being named as Britain’s most expensive seaside town, in a Halifax survey published this week.

Though it has no railway station and can take five or six hours to reach from London, properties here now typically cost almost £300,000 more than in Sandbanks, the seaside Shangri-La in Dorset favoured by Premier League footballers, which had held the ‘most expensive’ title for many years. 

Arriving in Salcombe on Wednesday, I admit to having wondered why it has been colonised by droves of weekend millionaires, as locals call the rich incomers (though one woman told me sniffily that she prefers Crew Klux Clan — because they often pootle about in boats and wear designer sailing outfits).

Far from being paved with gold, the A379 snaking down to the town is pot-holed, tortuous and so narrow that I was forever reversing to make way for some hulking Chelsea Tractor.

The weather didn’t help, either. On a lovely summer’s day, they say, Salcombe, with its turquoise estuary and secluded beaches, is a match for any Mediterranean resort. 

When I got there, it looked like any out-of-season English resort: drizzly, overcast and miserable.

But there was, I admit, a more grudging reason why I didn’t immediately take to a town where house prices are almost four times the national average.

In Morecambe, Lancashire, where I was raised, you can still buy a smart, three-bedroom semi for £150,000 — and though it is enjoying a resurgence, like many English seaside towns, it must languish towards the bottom of the Halifax league table.

By Thursday, with the sun now shining and Easter crowds thronging the bijou shops and cafes, I’d put my northern prejudices aside. 

And as Theo Spink showed me some of the des-reses on her books, I began to grasp why Salcombe has become the English Channel’s answer to Malibu.

Priced at £1.15 million (an absolute steal for Salcombe) the top-floor apartment at 3 Stonehanger Court has a wraparound balcony that serves as the perfect vantage point for our impromptu version of Location, Location, Location.

Gazing directly across the estuary towards East Portlemouth — the side where the reclusive pop star Kate Bush hides away, and the sometime summer redoubt of Blur singer Damon Albarn, doyenne TV royal reporter Jennie Bond, Michael Parkinson, plus a Dimbleby or two — my eye falls on a pretty, pink-washed house perched beside a private beach.

Theo recently sold it — to a self-made London businessman, so I’m told — for £5.5 million, but as prices have risen faster than the inrushing tide this past year, she says, it would already fetch at least £1.25 million more.

To our right, towards the open sea, is the Great Gates development, a popular location where a four-bedroom apartment recently went for £1.9 million. 

To our left and below us, in a prime waterfront location, there is a huge hole filled with rubble.

As my guide explains, this was once the site of an unprepossessing house which sold for £3.5 million, only to be demolished by its new owners, who intend to replace it with a creation more to their taste: a practice adopted by many weekend millionaires, as one sees from the preponderance of scaffolding, bulldozers and builders’ signs in the town. 

How much might it cost to erect this new dream home? ‘I wouldn’t deign to guess,’ says Theo, pointing out that a barge would be required to remove the rubble and bring in building material.

However many millions it takes, it will be a sound investment.

Briefly stopping to poke our noses into a postage-stamp, town-centre flat — at £350,000 one of the cheaper properties with her firm, Luscombe Maye — we wend round roads of alpine gradient to North Sands, where a historic former mill house is on at £2.25 million.

Then on to South Sands, where, in a scene redolent of the 1950s, children play cricket on the sandflats and hunt for crabs in the rock-pools while their parents huddle behind windbreaks, eating gritty sandwiches and reading their paperbacks. One or two hardly souls are even taking a dip, though — as one stickler for accuracy informs me — the water temperature is only 9.9c.

However, Theo has brought me here to see one of her most rewarding recent projects: selling nine of the 11 apartments in a modernist, four-storey block, ‘with a beach vibe’, overlooking the bay. 

Extraordinarily, one of these new flats, with just 1,400sq ft of floor space, recently fetched £1.95 million — her personal record per square foot, she says, endearingly admitting that her firm is in fierce competition with Salcombe’s other local estate agents, Marchand Petit, and that this gives her ‘bragging rights’.

So, who are they, these people who can afford to breeze down to South Devon and leave with the deeds of homes priced way beyond the reach of most?

Why have they alighted on Salcombe, when South-West England boasts numerous coastal towns of equal quaintness? And, more pertinently, how has their influx affected the 2,000 ordinary folk who live and work here? 

Enterprising locals have been renting their houses as holiday homes since the 19th century, when Salcombe’s handsome Victorian villas were built for prosperous merchants and sea captains. During the 1980s, however, as house prices rose quickly, they began selling them off.

Many early buyers were outdoorsy types from London attracted by the coastal paths, sandy beaches, exceptionally sunny micro-climate, and a sheltered harbour ideal for inexpert weekend boaters.

But what really set Salcombe apart from other resorts and made many people want to buy property here was the configuration of its houses. 

Built into the rugged hills that twist above the small town centre, a large number offer panoramic views of Kingsbridge estuary and are within easy walking distance of it, attractions that add zeros to the asking price.

Since the topography and planning restrictions leave little room for expansion, demand for properties also exceeds supply: Theo has 300 interested buyers on her waiting list.

Salcombe’s image as an exclusive playground for the upwardly mobile is another factor that drives prices ever higher. 

It feeds on itself, giving the spiral seemingly unstoppable momentum. You won’t find many rich foreign buyers here. Certainly not the Americans. Too distant from London. The Yanks don’t much like arduous walks or soggy picnics, either.

No, Salcombe is tailored to a decidedly English type of millionaire. Often, their fondness for the town is rooted in childhood family holidays and they come from all parts of the country, but principally the South-East and along the M5 corridor. 

A typical profile would be a self-made entrepreneur from the Midlands who sells a company and ploughs the profits into a second home.

Locals have another jokey soubriquet for their ilk: the Birmingham Navy.

The common denominator binding these megabucks incomers is that hardly any of them buy their Salcombe pile with the intention of living in it.

For some, they are expensive indulgences, to be enjoyed for a week or two each year and opened to friends during July and August when, for a few frenetic weeks, the population swells to 25,000, rendering the lanes impassable, restaurant tables unbookable and the estuary so busy as to be almost unnavigable. 

For others they are hard-headed investments. Indeed, many buyers are so affluent that they don’t trouble to rent out their boltholes, though they would fetch several thousand pounds a week at the height of summer.

Outside their new South Sands apartments, I met a couple from the Home Counties with two grown-up children. 

They declined to say how much they paid, but I hear it was about £1.5 million. The husband, a retired engineer, told me with a smile that his wife, who worked in insurance, had been the high earner.

She had set her heart on owning a property in Salcombe. ‘I used to come on holidays in my teens and we brought our kids down in summer, from a tiny age, so it’s a bit of nostalgia,’ she said, returning from a beach walk with their dog.

‘It’s also a very safe place (locals attribute Salcombe’s low crime rate partly to the difficulty criminals have in accessing it).’ 

Gesturing towards the ferry, a timeless blue craft boarded and disembarked by way of a sea-tractor that carries the passengers into the sea, she added: ‘It’s just so quintessentially English. A happy little haven.’

For those with a million or two, at minimum, to spare, perhaps so. The problem is, of course, that in this remote corner of Devon, where many jobs are seasonal and wages low, the haves are greatly outnumbered by the have-nots.

In Salcombe, it has created a society made up of two economically divided — and increasingly polarised — sections.

There are those who can afford to come in, buy beautiful houses, then leave them lying empty.

Then there are those who have deep roots in the town and are desperate to remain, but haven’t a hope of earning the kind of money that even Salcombe’s cheapest properties command.

Indeed, it came as a surprise to learn that in a town where some think nothing of splashing out £100 to lunch on locally caught lobster washed down with Chablis, then wandering along Fore Street to buy a £1,500 watercolour to hang in their mothballed chalet, a dozen residents are so poor that they receive weekly handouts delivered by the food bank in nearby Kingsbridge.

Away from the glass-fronted beach palaces, however, there are pockets of hardship, according to Gerrie Messer, who manages the food bank.

As there are only 288 social housing properties, homelessness is not unknown, either, she says — an irony, given that so many flats and houses are unused.

‘The problem is worsened because food in Salcombe is more expensive than in outside towns and villages,’ Ms Messer told me. ‘Fish and chips might cost more than £15 there and £9 elsewhere simply because of the type of people it attracts. Shops and restaurants push up the prices.’

The resentment all this creates is palpable. Shopping for essentials in the Co-op, a woman living in a low-rent housing development — the only home she could afford, after retiring and moving back to her hometown — told me angrily she barely recognises the Salcombe she knew as a girl. Back then, the incomers at least made the effort to integrate and play their part in the community.

‘Now we get these aloof, nouveau-riche Hoorahs who spend a couple of weeks here, drinking gin and tonics and sailing about with their friends, then go off to the Caribbean, St Tropez or wherever. They do nothing whatsoever for Salcombe.

‘They just have parties and ruin the environment with their boats. We used to have a huge population of seahorses in the sea-grass along the estuary. You won’t find many of them now. 

This town has become like Venice. All the real local people have been priced out. I’m not jealous. I just feel very, very sad.’

Her misgivings are shared by Tory county councillor Rufus Gilbert. While he and his colleagues were ‘amazed’ when the town was named Britain’s most expensive, he said, this was not an accolade to be celebrated.

‘Housing prices are too high for local people to live here, that’s obvious,’ he told me. ‘If the people who want to work in Salcombe can’t afford to live in the town they were born in and went to school in, that’s a sad reflection.

‘It can, perhaps, create a more sterile area for all. And as property prices go up for the privileged few who can come to live in and enjoy this wonderful area . . . it damages the economy, because you can’t employ people to provide the services they require. But I don’t think anyone knows the answer.’

They surely don’t. In an effort to redress the balance, South Hams District Council last year made it a legal requirement for all new-build homes to be sold as principal residences. 

It also backed a Government Bill that will allow local authorities to double the council tax on second homes, although, as Devon’s Liberal Democrat leader Julian Brazil remarked: ‘That is peanuts to these people. It will cost them more than that to fill up their boats with petrol.’

And so, it seems, these rich interlopers, with their indifference towards the community, will gradually suck the soul out of Salcombe. In Bonningtons newsagent, one of the handful of traditional shops that remain in the high street, the proprietor made a grim prediction.

Given that first-time buyers will never again get on the property ladder in Salcombe, she said, genuinely local residents would become an extinct species within the next generation.

It is a prospect that must fill the weekend millionaires with dread. For who, then, will be left to wait on the poor darlings as they recline in their zillion-pound seaside piles?