Burnage Lane, Burnage, Manchester M19

This four-bedroom semi offers a substantial canvas: spacious living and bedroom areas, a separate dining room, driveway and a good-sized garden, in a location with useful links and amenities. The dated finishes throughout the rooms shown, poor-condition kitchen, old-fashioned bathroom and separate WC give a buyer scope to reshape and modernise the house to their own specification. The kitchen staining and visible cracks or splits should be investigated as part of planning the work; no obvious major structural failure is apparent in the exterior photos.

The asking price is £317 per sq ft, around 4.8% above the local average, so price is not a value advantage here. More importantly, the £350,000 asking price plus the £45,000–£75,000 renovation range puts the purchase-and-works cost above local benchmarks for this floor area; that comparison is against current local average value, not a forecast of the finished home’s value. This is therefore a sizeable project whose budget needs careful appraisal, despite the space and location.

Even a workable headline price does not rescue the maths when once you include an estimated £60,000 of works on top of the asking price, spend approaches £410,000 — roughly 18% above what comparable floor area achieves locally in current condition. Hence the weak economics component — a proxy for today's market, not post-refurbishment GDV.