Coates doesn't give you much to go on from the road — no parade of shops, no obvious centre of gravity, just the quiet scatter of buildings that marks out a hamlet in this part of the South East. That's the character, really: a place defined by what it isn't rather than what it is. You won't find a high street to judge, and there's no visible commercial pulse to read the area by. That absence matters more than usual here, because the numbers that normally help pin down a place — crime figures, school ratings, transport links, the shape of the housing stock — simply aren't recorded for Coates itself. What exists instead is the wider frame around it. It sits within Chichester district, where the typical house price runs to £415,000, noticeably above the national medians for England as a whole. That alone tells you this is a part of the South East where property doesn't come cheap, and a hamlet within that district is unlikely to buck the pattern. Beyond that, honestly, there isn't enough here to paint the scene you'd want before deciding to live somewhere — no named school to judge, no station to time a commute from, no park or restaurant to anchor a weekend. What can be said is that Coates belongs to a pricier corner of the South East, within a district where half of homes sell for well over the national norm. Anyone weighing it up would do well to look at Chichester district's own detail, and at Coates itself on the ground, before drawing conclusions this data can't yet support.