How to Analyse a Rightmove Listing

Ignore the description first; it is the agent's best case. Go for the facts that constrain the deal. The asking price, and crucially the price history: Rightmove shows reductions, and a listing cut from £135,000 to £120,000 after ninety days tells you about the seller's position in a way no wording can. The floorplan, for the total area in square feet or square metres; without an area you cannot compare this property to anything else, so a missing floorplan is your first question to the agent. The EPC, which gives you a second area reading, the current band and, in the report behind it, the property's heating and glazing. And the tenure: leasehold with a short lease is a different purchase entirely.

On our worked example the listing says £120,000, reduced once from £127,500, a 72 square metre two-bed terrace, EPC D, freehold. Write those five facts down before any opinion forms.

This extraction step is exactly what PropDetect does when you paste the link: price, history, areas, EPC, tenure and every photo, pulled and structured before analysis begins.

The photo set is a condition report if you read it as one. Kitchens and bathrooms carry most of the cost, so judge them first: dated but clean is cheap to keep, damaged or missing is expensive to replace. Then the surfaces, cracked or blown plaster, artex, staining that hints at damp. Then the giveaways in the corners of frames: a fuse-wire consumer unit in a hallway photo suggests a rewire, a back boiler or storage heaters mean a heating budget, single glazing shows in the frame profiles.

Count what is missing too. Agents photograph the best rooms; a two-bed listing with one bedroom pictured has a second bedroom you have not seen. Our terrace shows a 1990s kitchen in usable condition, a tired but intact bathroom, woodchip and artex in both receptions, gas central heating with a visible combi, and no photos of the second bedroom or the rear elevation, so the budget must assume both need work.

Our guide to estimating refurb costs covers pricing what you see room by room. On the terrace, a medium refurb prices out at about £19,000: kitchen refreshed rather than replaced, bathroom replaced, full redecoration, new carpets, electrics tidied. With the 15% contingency you should always carry, call it £21,850. PropDetect runs this same judgement from the photos automatically, room by room and element by element, priced against rates calibrated on real builder quotes.

Your valuation is only as good as the comparables under it, and comparable selection has rules. Same road first, then the immediate streets; the market pays for a postcode, not a radius. Size-matched, within about 15% of your property's floor area, because price per square metre falls apart across sizes. Same property type, terrace against terrace. And recent, ideally sold in the last twelve to eighteen months, adjusted mentally for where the local market has moved since.

Pull the sold prices from the Land Registry record (Rightmove's sold section shows the same data) and be suspicious of your own optimism: the comparable you want to use is the one that sold refurbished, because that is your end product. On our example street, three refurbished terraces of 68 to 78 square metres sold in the last eighteen months: £158,000, £164,500 and £171,000. The middle of that set, weighted slightly to the most similar house, puts the done-up value at £165,000. That number, the gross development value, anchors everything; if you want to sanity-check it per square metre, £165,000 over 72 square metres is £2,292, which should sit comfortably inside what the comparables paid per square metre.

PropDetect builds its GDV from sold comparables the same way, and shows you the comparables, the adjustments and a confidence rating on the result, so the valuation is auditable rather than a number from a box. When comparables are thin it says so and widens the search window rather than guessing.

Rent is quicker: search the same postcode district for two-bed terraces currently listed to let, discard the outliers styled for a different market, and take the sensible middle. Cross-check against anything actually let-agreed if visible. On our patch, comparable terraces list at £750 to £875 a month; £825 is defensible for a freshly refurbished example.

Be strict about condition matching here too. The £875 listing with the grey herringbone floor is the post-refurb rent, not the day-one rent, and if your strategy needs the property let during works or before refurbishment, the dated version rents nearer the £750 end.

Now the two numbers. Suppose the reduction history supports an offer of £105,000. Total money in is the purchase plus refurb plus buying and holding costs: £105,000, plus the £21,850 refurb, plus about £6,850 of stamp duty at the additional-property rates, legals, survey and six months of holding, £133,700 all in.

The flip test: sell at the £165,000 GDV, lose about £3,300 to agents and legals, and £161,700 comes back against £133,700 out, a profit of £28,000. As a margin on GDV that is 17%, solid but under the 20% floor most flippers want for the risk, so this is a workable flip rather than a great one.

The BRR test: refinance at 75% of the £165,000 end value and the lender advances £123,750, releasing all but £9,950 of your £133,700. At £825 rent, with roughly £567 a month of interest-only mortgage at current rates and £130 of running costs, the property clears about £128 a month, £1,536 a year on under £10,000 left in, a 15% return on the money still working, with the flip profit held in reserve as equity. On these numbers the terrace is a BRR deal that happens to have a flip fallback, which is exactly the kind of conclusion the maths exists to force.

PropDetect runs both tests, plus buy-to-let, HMO and bridging scenarios, on every analysis, and commits to a verdict, strong, solid or avoid, with the reasons shown and every input editable. The worked example above is the manual version of that verdict.