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# September, in full: 9,500 listing checks, 40 properties analysed, 2 offers, nothing bought

An honest account of one month sourcing in the North East.

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I want to write down what September actually produced, because the numbers are more useful than the summary. Anyone can say they had a busy month. The question is what came out of the other end.

Here is everything, including the parts that did not work.

The market side: six sweeps, 9,500 listing checks

We pull the entire North East market — every listing across 122 outcodes in the NE, SR, DH, DL and TS postcodes — and run it through the same filter. In September we did that six times.

| Sweep | Live listings pulled | |—|—| | 21 September | 1,864 | | 22 September | 2,101 | | 23 September | 2,097 | | 24 September | 1,637 | | 30 September | 1,627 | | plus the mid-month Property Engine exports | 196 | | Total listing checks | 9,522 |

One thing to be straight about: that is 9,500 checks, not 9,500 properties. We are looking at the same 1,600 to 2,100 live listings each time — the same houses, week after week, with prices moving and new stock arriving at the edges. The market itself is only about two thousand houses in our band. We just look at all of them, repeatedly.

Why repeat it. Because asking prices move, and a house nobody would have bought in August can become a deal in October without the agent ever ringing you. One example from this week: a two-bed in a former colliery village sat at £45,000 for two months, then dropped to £40,000. That £5,000 changed it from marginal to the best yield we have found.

What survived the filter

The band is two and three-bed houses between £40,000 and £110,000, freehold, not auction, not cash-buyers-only, with evidence in the listing that the property is in reasonable condition. On the final full run of the month — 30 September, 1,627 listings — here is where it landed:

| Stage | Count | |—|—| | Live listings pulled | 1,627 | | In band (2–3 bed houses, £40–110k, decent condition) | 273 | | Houses (removed 2 flats and lodges that slipped through) | 271 | | With a rent verified against real local lettings | 269 |

Then the numbers. Three different briefs, because not every investor wants the same thing:

| Brief | Cleared it outright | |—|—| | 8% yield / 15% return / £250 a month | 8 | | 7% / 12% / £200 a month | 10 | | 5.5% / 8% / £100 a month | 70 |

That last line is the one I keep coming back to. Eight houses in the whole market clear a serious investor’s numbers. Seventy clear a reasonable one’s. Same houses, same rents, same condition. The only thing that changed was what the buyer needed — and it changes the answer eightfold.

The part almost nobody does

Passing the yield test is not the same as being a good deal. A house can pay 16% and still be full market value, and if you buy at market value, the yield you bought is the yield you are stuck with.

So for every property that cleared the gate, we pulled the sold prices for its own street — what similar houses on the same road actually sold for, with dates.

Eight houses cleared the yield test. We checked all eight against their own streets. Two survived.

The one that killed most of them:

> A house passed comfortably — 16% gross, £528 a month clear after all costs. Six sales on its street in three years, median £38,200. The asking price was £73,000. It was 91% above the street it sits on.

The yield was real. The value was not there. And the £528 a month was built on a rent that looked like a room-by-room figure rather than a whole house — which is a thing you only notice when you check the street the rent came from.

Two more failed the same way: three-beds asking £60,000 against a street whose median was £50,000. Twenty per cent above. Both cleared the yield gate. Both were expensive.

And one we dropped without valuing it at all: nothing has sold on that street in three years. No comparables means no provable value. I would rather say that than guess, and a lender’s valuer will reach the same conclusion.

The two that survived sat 10% and 21.5% below their own streets. Both are well-evidenced — five sales in three years on one, three on the other. That is what a discount looks like when you can prove it.

The analysis count

Across September, about 40 properties were taken past the first gate and analysed properly — sold comparables pulled and size-adjusted, rents verified against actual lettings, condition judged from photographs, and the full model run at asking price and at an offer price.

Forty sounds low against 9,500. It is the honest ratio, and it is the number that matters. Screening is cheap; proving is expensive, and most of the 9,500 did not deserve the effort. A house that fails the first check does not get the other three.

We also ran two side-scans:

• A low-band scan — everything between £25,000 and £75,000, houses only, 656 properties. This one keeps properties needing modernisation rather than excluding them, because at that price the work is part of the deal. 642 were rent-checked: 90 cleared the 8% brief, 180 the 7% brief, 466 the 5.5% brief.
• An auction scan — 2,104 auction lots catalogued, every September auction in the country, filtered to 31 North East lots. Only four carried an explicit “unsold” tag. We approach auctioneers after the sale for lots that failed, because a vendor who has just watched their house not sell is the most motivated seller there is — but we do not buy at auction, because the buyer’s reservation fee is paid before a surveyor has been in.

The communication side

| | | |—|—| | Emails sent | 664 | | Emails received | 638 | | Distinct agents and firms written to | 118 | | Agent branches asked for tenanted stock | 156 | | Offers put in writing | 2 | | Offers accepted | 1 | | Properties bought | 0 |

Six hundred and sixty-four emails, and two offers. That ratio is the most uncomfortable number in this piece, and it is the one I would change first.

What went out, and what came back

Two offers went in writing.

The first was accepted in principle: a two-bed terrace, £48,000 against a £49,950 asking price, and the vendor said yes subject to a viewing. Then we looked at the photographs properly — carpets worn through, walls needing decoration, a dated bathroom — and the property was not what the buyer’s brief allowed. We withdrew and apologised. The lesson was expensive but cheap in hindsight: we offered before we had a condition verdict, and we should have known better after a fortnight of telling agents we would only send what was ready to let.

The second went in at £48,000 against £56,000 on a tenanted three-bed. The agent never gave us the rent figure, so the offer could not be evidenced, and it lapsed.

Seven properties were put in front of investors, with their comparables, rents and returns attached. One investor engaged properly: he asked for the workings, questioned the tenure, told us he wanted to let to social housing, and then asked for the figures again in more detail. That conversation is the best thing the month produced.

And the thing that explains why no investor has replied until now: we have three newsletter subscribers, and until 30 September we had never sent a single newsletter. Six weeks of sourcing work, thousands of properties analysed, and no way for anyone to hear about it. That was the real bottleneck, and it was not a stock problem at all.

The four things that were actually wrong

1. We screened more than we proved. Nine and a half thousand listing checks produced forty analyses and two offers. The middle of that funnel is too thin — not enough properties carried through to a written offer.

2. We offered before we had evidence. Both offers should have followed a rent confirmation and a condition check. One was withdrawn, one lapsed. Neither was a bad property; both were bad order of operations.

3. The mail filter was eating real agent mail. At the end of the month we found fourteen genuine agent emails sitting in the spam folder, going back eight weeks — two firms had been sending us their property lists throughout and none of it had been read. Some of the conclusion “nobody has stock” was an artefact of our own mailbox, not the market.

4. Nothing was published. The newsletter, the blog and the social posts all existed as drafts and none had gone out. We built a machine and never switched it on.

What changed at the very end of the month

On 30 September we finally shipped: the first newsletter, sent to all three subscribers. A blog post. A Facebook page post with the analysis as a chart. The rent map — every North East district, what houses actually let for, and what that rent can carry — live and free to download.

And the first real investor conversation moved to the point where money was discussed: proof of funds, ID, and a reservation fee. That is the first time in the company’s life that anyone has asked for something of an investor, and it took six weeks of work to earn the right to ask.

The honest summary

September: 9,522 listing checks. 40 properties analysed in full. 2 offers. 1 accepted. 0 completed.

That is not a good month by any measure of output. It is a reasonable month by one measure: we now know, with evidence rather than assumption, that the North East market contains roughly eight houses at a time that clear a serious investor’s numbers, and that most of those still fail on price against their own street. We know the funnel. We know the shape of the problem.

The two numbers I want to move in October are the last two rows of that table — offers and completions. Everything else is machinery, and the machinery works.

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Kola Bilewu runs Mike Bells Property Sourcing, sourcing turnkey buy-to-lets across the North East. The North East Rent Map — every district, what houses let for, and what that rent can carry — is free at [mikebells.co.uk](https://mikebells.co.uk/the-north-east-rent-map/).

Yesterday we asked 130 estate agency branches whether they had a tenanted house for one of our investors. 90 of those emails came straight back. Our mail host allows 50 an hour; we sent 130 in about fifteen minutes, and every one of the 90 was returned with the same line — exceeded the maximum emails per hour. The fault was ours, not theirs.

Of the branches that did see it, seven wrote back properly, and two sent auto-replies. One lettings agency volunteered a house that is already tenanted, with a tenant paying on a rolling contract. We are chasing the inspection and the paperwork on that one now.

We made no offers yesterday. We sent no property to an investor either. No market-wide screen ran at all.

In the North East at the moment, the arithmetic is the hard part, not the asking. We screen a lot and show very little, and we would rather publish the week that produced nothing than a number that flatters us.

Every listing I look at goes through the same gate: 8% gross yield, 15% return on the money in, £250 a month left after costs, and the house ready to let as it stands.

This week I added a second half to the test, and it changed almost everything. Because a house can clear the yield gate and still be full market value — and if you buy at market value, the yield you bought is the yield you are stuck with.

**Eight houses passed the yield gate this week. I checked all eight against what has actually sold on their own streets. Two survived.**

The one that killed most of them

One house passed comfortably — 16% gross, 22% return on cash, £528 a month clear. Good numbers. Then I pulled the sold prices for its own street: six sales in three years, median £38,200. The asking price was £73,000. It is 91% above the street it sits on, and the rent the agent had quoted looked like a room-by-room figure rather than a whole house.

Two three-beds in a former colliery village in Gateshead had the same problem in miniature: asking £60,000 against five sales on that street with a median of £50,000. Twenty per cent above. Both cleared the yield gate. Both were expensive.

And one house I simply dropped: nothing has sold on that street in three years, so there is no comparable at all. Without sold evidence you cannot prove the value, and I would rather say so than guess.

The two that survived

A house in Bishop Auckland at £54,950, against three street sales with a median of £70,000. That is 21.5% below the median, and below the cheapest of the three as well. A real discount.

A two-bed in the same Gateshead village at £45,000, against those same five sales and a median of £50,000. Ten per cent below, and the street is well evidenced. It is the smaller discount, but it is the one I would back with more confidence, because five sales in three years is a street you can actually read.

The rent claim I would have believed, and still didn’t buy

One agent advertised a house at “offers over £79,950” with “around 10% yield”. I checked. The nearest three-bed lettings to that street are £690 to £700 a month — and on £696 the gross yield really is 10.4%. His claim was honest.

It still fails, and here is why. Take off 12% management, £40 insurance, £50 maintenance and a 75% mortgage at 5.5%, and you are left with £248 a month — two pounds under the £250 the brief needs — and a return on the buyer’s cash of 9.7%, not 15%. On the same day, another agent advertised £800 a month and “12% yield” on a house in Hartlepool where the two nearest three-bed lettings let at £675, and where the vendor’s own works quote added £6,500 to the bill.

**Gross yield is a headline. Net is the number that decides whether you can hold the house for ten years.**

And my own correction

I got a street wrong this week. I told an investor the median sold price on a street in East Cleveland was £62,250 and that there was almost no equity in it. The full set is eight sales in twenty months, median £69,250, so the house was nearer 13% below the street than 4%. He had the correction the same day, in writing, with the working shown.

That is how I would want to be treated if I were buying. If a number I give you turns out to be wrong, you will hear it from me and not discover it yourself.

The one thing to take from this

Ask for the sold prices on the actual street before you ask for the rent. A street that has traded eight times in twenty months is a street you can value. A street with nothing on it for three years is a guess dressed up as a comparable — and I will tell you when a deal is a guess.

Sold prices are HM Land Registry Price Paid data. Rents are live local lettings checked the same day. Streets, addresses and agents come with the sourcing agreement.

Two properties came in yesterday. One cleared the first gate.

The one worth a look is a two-bed terrace in Darlington at £70,000. On rents of £575 to £600 that is a gross yield of 9.9% to 10.3%, against the £467 a month it needs to clear 8%. That is a genuine margin at the asking price, which is rarer than it sounds.

I asked 26 estate agency branches for stock the day before. Two came back. One has nothing on its books; the other is keeping us on file. That is a normal ratio early on, and the honest reading is that it is a numbers game played patiently rather than a funnel.

No market-wide screen ran yesterday. And one thing I want to be straight about: the Darlington yield is calculated from district rents, not from sold or let comparables on that street. It is a reason to look at the property, not evidence that it works. The rent has to be checked street by street before it goes to anyone as a deal.

That distinction — a sorting exercise versus evidence — is most of what separates a property that looks good from one that completes.

Nine properties crossed the desk yesterday. Three are worth a second look, three are auction lots I need the terms on, and three fail on the rent.

The three worth pursuing are in Stanley, Bedlington and Ferryhill. Gross yields run from 6.3% to 14.4% across the nine, which sounds like a wide range until you notice what causes it: the asking prices are all in a similar band, and it is the rent that moves. That is the whole business in one line. Price tells you what a seller wants. Rent tells you what the house can carry.

Three lots — Wheatley Hill, Consett and Seaham — are being sold at auction, so I need the terms before I can say anything useful about them. Three more, in Houghton-le-Spring, South Hetton and Horden, fail on the rent at the price asked. I would rather say that plainly than send them on and let someone else discover it at the valuation.

No market-wide screen ran yesterday. Every figure here comes from the individual properties, and the yields are gross, which is a sorting exercise rather than evidence.

If you are buying in the North East this year, tell me your budget and the return you need. I screen a lot and send very little, and I would rather send you one that works.

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

Sixty-eight of the sixty-nine properties that looked like deals this week were not deals. None of them failed because they needed work. They failed on price against rent.

This is the part of sourcing nobody puts in a brochure, so here is the week in full.

What the week actually looked like

I swept 2,101 live listings across the North East. Of those, 312 came on since Monday. I put 69 of them through the numbers our clients buy to:

• 8% gross yield minimum
• 15% return on capital minimum
• £250 a month left after mortgage, management, insurance and maintenance
• and the house has to be ready to let as it stands

Sixty-eight failed. The pattern is always the same: vendors are asking more than the rents in their own streets support, and the gap is usually somewhere between £10,000 and £30,000. Not a gap that a bit of haggling closes.

The one that got through, and why I still dropped it

A three-bedroom terrace in Sunderland, finished inside, asking £109,000. At the £1,150 a month it was advertised at, it cleared every number comfortably.

Then I checked the rent properly.

The five nearest lettings at £1,150 were in Humbledon. The streets around the house itself let at £750 to £850. On the real figure, the asking price is about £32,000 above what the numbers will carry. Two streets away, the same house is a different deal entirely.

The lesson, because it costs people real money

A rent figure is not a fact until you know which street it came from. A house that only works on the best rent in its postcode is not a deal, it is a hope.

So every rent I use is checked twice: against the nearest comparable lettings, and against the whole mile around them. Then I take the lower of the two. It will occasionally tell me a house works when it does not, but it will never tell me a house works when it plainly does not.

The same lesson applies to the sale evidence

Sizes matter as much as addresses. Until this week the comparables engine matched sales by street and type but not by floor area, which meant a two-bedroom house two-thirds the size of the subject could set its value. Fixing that moved one Sunderland asking price from “49% above market” to “34% above market” — still above, but honest.

On the North East’s mixed streets, where a refurbished and an unrefurbished version of the same terrace can sell a year apart for double, the spread has to be shown, not hidden behind a median. On six of the fourteen properties still on my desk this week, the spread is wide enough that Fontaine would want a written agent valuation before they would touch it.

What I am working on now

Two houses that do stack, and both are waiting on a rent confirmation rather than a viewing:

• A two-bedroom terrace in west Newcastle with the tightest comparables I have seen this month, and 14 comparable sales behind the valuation.
• A house in Northumberland that is genuinely turnkey, where the only open question is what it would let for.

If you are looking to buy this year, tell me the area and the budget and I will tell you what is achievable there. If it is not achievable, I will say so rather than send you something to fill the silence.

I charge a sourcing fee that we agree in writing before I introduce anything. No commission from agents, no markup, and if a purchase does not complete you do not pay.

I sent an investor a deal this week showing a 33% discount.

It was 3%.

Here is what happened, because I think it is the most useful thing I have learned this year about buying property in the North East.

The deal

A three-bed terrace. Two sold comparables on the same street: £118,000 and £85,000. The house I was valuing was smaller — 85 sqm against their 110 and 95.

So I size-adjusted both. That gave me a value of £83,618 against an asking price of £56,000. A 33% discount. On paper, a very good deal.

Then the investor asked one question.

“What did the houses on the same street sell for that are a similar size?”

What I had missed

I went back to the raw records. There were not two sales on that street in the last 12 months. There were three. The third was £67,000 — the most recent, and the cheapest.

It had no floor area recorded on the EPC register, so the system I was using had quietly dropped it, and kept the two biggest houses on the street. The two that made the deal look good.

Same street	Sold	Price	Size	Adjusted to 85 sqm
Comparable one	27 Feb 2026	£118,000	110 sqm	£91,182
Comparable two	19 Dec 2025	£85,000	95 sqm	£76,053
The one that was dropped	10 Apr 2026	£67,000	not recorded	cannot be measured

When I redid it properly — matching on size first, then widening the radius only if needed — I found eleven sales within a quarter of a mile, all between 76 and 93 sqm. Size-adjusted, their lower quartile was £57,725.

The discount was 3%, not 33%.

Why this matters if you are buying from a distance

Two things go wrong when you value a property from a spreadsheet, and both of them flatter the deal.

The comparables are bigger than the house. A 110 sqm house is not a comparable for an 85 sqm house, however close it is. Match the size first. Then the distance. Never the other way round.

The comparables do not say what condition they were in. Land Registry tells you what was paid. It does not tell you whether the house had been refurbished. On some streets in County Durham and Teesside, the gap between a doer-upper and a finished house is two and a half times the price. On one street in Shotton Colliery: a house bought at £32,000 and resold at £76,999. Another bought at £39,999 and resold at £93,330.

Put both of those in a spreadsheet and take a median, and you get a number that describes neither market.

What we do instead

Every property we bring a client is valued the same way:

• Sold comparables from the same street first, then a quarter of a mile, then half a mile — and no further, because prices vary street to street
• Matched on size and property type before anything else
• At least two sold comparables, with a written agent valuation added if a third cannot be found
• Rent evidence from within half a mile, and the actual rent the property is achieving if it is tenanted

If a property cannot be evidenced that way, we do not bring it to you. That is why the list is short.

And if you are ever shown a deal with a big discount, ask one question: what did the similar-sized houses on that street sell for, and when? If the answer is vague, the discount probably is too.