Every property we look at goes through the same four questions: does it yield 8% gross, does it return 15% on the cash, does it leave £250 a month after costs, and is it ready to let as it stands? This week we kept count of what that test throws away.
1,637 live listings across the North East. 246 in the buying band with any turnkey evidence. 246 rent-checked. Ten cleared the gate at the asking price.
Then we read the adverts, opened the photographs and checked the leases — and nine of the ten fell away. Here is exactly what happened to them, because the rejections are the part nobody publishes.
What killed the other nine
| What happened | Properties |
| The advert itself named a rent below what the numbers needed | 3 |
| A lease too short to mortgage | 1 |
| The bedroom count was wrong — advertised as three, described as two | 1 |
| Not turnkey once the photographs were opened | 2 |
| The vendor had already turned down just under the asking price | 1 |
| No interior photographs at all, so nothing to judge | 1 |
The first row is the one to remember. Three houses were passing our screen on a rent that nobody was paying:
advertised £77,000 our model read £987 the advert said £650 advertised £50,000 our model read £675 the advert said £500 advertised £55,000 our model read £650 the advert said £550
An agent who tells you the tenant pays £550 has just done you a favour. That figure is worth more than any comparable, because it is a fact rather than an estimate. Once all three tests are applied, every £1 a month of rent carries roughly £122 of purchase price — so £350 a month of wishful thinking is a £43,000 mistake.
The district that fooled the screen
We map every result by postcode district. By that measure, NE17 came out best in the whole region this week, and it was not close: three of the five properties we checked there cleared the numbers. Nowhere else in the North East produced more than one.
Then we checked what the village actually lets for.
The five nearest lettings that produced those rents were four houses on a new-build estate half a mile away, at £975–£1,025. The village’s own terraces are advertised at £480, £575 and £600. There is not a single three-bedroom letting advertised in the village at all.
Which means the three-bedroom rent the screen was using — £750 — had no evidence behind it. It was the new estate’s rent, applied to the village’s houses. Two houses that looked like 15% yields on paper do not work at any sensible offer.
Our own screen rated its best district the place it got most wrong.
One practical thing
Before you trust any rent figure, ask this: which street did it come from?
If the answer is a new-build estate, a marina, or the other side of a bypass, you are not looking at a comparable. You are looking at a different market that happens to share a postcode.
The same applies to the figure in the advert. If the vendor’s own tenant is paying £550, that is your rent until somebody proves otherwise.
What we do with this
We would rather bring you one deal we can defend than twenty we cannot. That means working a screen that kills 99% of what is on the market, and then killing most of what survives. If you want to see the next one before it goes out, the weekly dispatch goes out on Thursday mornings and you can sign up below.
Kola Bilewu
Mike Bells Property Sourcing
kola@mikebells.co.uk · 07442 827515
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