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Manchester Sourcing

Manchester Sourcing offers an award winning hands free portfolio building service in the North West. We can help you start or scale your property portfolio.

Our turnkey service helps you find, negotiate, purchase, refurbish and let your next property.

03/11/2026

A 3-bed in north Liverpool for £102,000. Here's the catch.

21 Pansy Street, Kirkdale, L5 7RS. A bay-fronted 3-bed terrace, just under two miles from the city centre. It isn't advertised, so there are no agent photos. What you see is our own walkthrough from the viewing.

The work is cosmetic: painting, flooring, freshening up the kitchen and bathroom, some damp, a roof repair and the safety certificates. £9,500 + VAT. Nothing structural, no conversion.

Then it goes on a 3-year lease with an established social housing provider at £850 a month, as a family home. The rent is paid whether the house is full or empty. You keep the roof, the boiler, the electrics and the pipework.

The catch, and there are two. The bathroom is downstairs, which is how a lot of these old terraces were built. And £850 is the same rent we're getting on 2-beds round there, so the third bedroom doesn't buy you more rent today.

What it can buy you is the exit. Done-up 3-beds in the area sell for around £125,000.

It's leasehold, 999 years from 1894: peppercorn ground rent, no service charge.

Want the full numbers? DM me "LEASE".

02/11/2026

"So when does the rent actually start?"

Two investors asked me that this month. Both thought they'd have keys inside a month.

Here's the honest timeline.

Offer accepted to completion is 12 to 16 weeks on our purchases. The national average is around 120 days, mostly because most sales sit in a chain. Leasehold runs longer.

Then the refurbishment. Light cosmetic work is 2 to 4 weeks. A heavier job — moving a bathroom, reworking a layout — is 2 to 3 months, which is exactly why we avoid heavy refurbs.

The lease with the provider is signed after the work is finished, not before.

So the house is empty for the whole of that refurbishment. If you bought with a mortgage, you're paying it through those weeks with nothing coming the other way.

That's the catch, and I say it on every call. Budget for the empty period before you get excited about the yield.

What you get at the end of it is a 3 to 5 year lease with an established social housing provider, paid monthly, whether or not anyone is in the house.

How long did your last purchase take from offer to first rent?

30/10/2026

Last month someone sent me a 4-bed HMO in Ormskirk. Vacant. £225,000, cash buyers only. 12.8% gross on paper, from when it was let at £2,400 a month.

My reply was one line. Not worth it.

Not because it's a bad town. Because we'd bought 5-beds there at £190,000.

A bigger house, for £35,000 less. Once you know what the street actually trades at, the "deal" stops being one.

That's most of this job, if I'm honest. Not finding houses. Knowing what they're worth before anyone tells you, so you can say no quickly and politely, and they still send you the next one.

The yield on an advert is worked out on the asking price. Check the price first, and the yield sorts itself out.

What's the fastest no you've given this year?

29/10/2026

Buy-to-let mortgage rates have gone from 5.47% in August to 5.79% at the start of October, and some economists expect the Bank of England to raise rates on 5 November. So before you buy, run the numbers one point higher. I have worked through a typical Liverpool two-bed at 6%, 7%, 7.79% and 8.79%, what has changed since our October update, and the bits a rate rise does not touch. Five minutes, and worth it.

https://www.manchestersourcing.co.uk/post/buy-to-let-mortgage-rates-rising-stress-test

29/10/2026

Liverpool voted this month to extend its Article 4 rules on HMOs. Five areas straight away, and the rest of the city to follow on 12 months' notice.

Here's why that matters.

Article 4 takes away the right to turn a family house into a small HMO without planning permission. Inside one, you apply, and where there are already lots of HMOs, refusals are common.

Manchester is covered across the whole city. Salford almost entirely. Bolton and Oldham borough-wide. Now more of Liverpool.

A professional HMO needs professional tenants, near jobs and transport. Those are exactly the areas getting covered. So investors get pushed further out: weaker demand, and higher prices for the few houses that already have permission.

A family house on a social housing lease isn't an HMO, so Article 4 doesn't touch it. It works in the more affordable areas, where the purchase price and the refurb are both lower, and the provider takes on the tenant risk.

The catch: the headline rent is lower than an HMO's. You swap a bigger gross number for a simpler one.

And if you're buying anything to convert, check the council's map and ring the planning team with the exact address before you offer. Boundaries follow streets, not postcodes.

DM me "LEASE" if you want to see where that leaves your budget.

27/10/2026

"How do I know the refurb figure is real?"

An investor asked me that this month. Fair question. The refurb is the easiest number in a deal pack to make look small.

Here's how we do it.

Every deal goes out with the refurb itemised, not one round number. On a Liverpool terrace we sent out last week, that's eleven lines: electrics, plumbing and heating, plastering, painting, floors, damp, a new kitchen, the bathroom, the garden, the roof and project management. £18,000 + VAT in total.

The price is quoted and fixed upfront, before you commit. If something extra turns up once the work starts, you hear about it the same day, with photos.

And ask for the written scope. You should.

The catch: a fixed price is only as good as the look round behind it. Some things don't show until the plaster comes off. That's why we lean towards light refurbs, 2 to 4 weeks of work, and steer away from heavy ones.

If a sourcer gives you one round number and no breakdown, ask why.

DM me "LEASE" if you want to see what a full breakdown looks like.

27/10/2026

£10,000 under asking in north Liverpool. Here's the catch.

55 Melrose Road, Kirkdale, L4 1UJ. A 2-bed end of terrace, with a side garden most of the street doesn't have.

Asking £95,000. Secured at £85,000. Two-bed terraces within three quarters of a mile average around £103,600 on asking prices.

The catch is the work. It needs everything: a new kitchen, a rewire, plastering, floors, damp and the roof. £18,000 + VAT. That's a full refurbishment, not a tidy-up, and the photos show it exactly as we found it.

Once it's done, it goes on a 3-year lease with an established social housing provider at £850 a month, as a family home. The rent is paid whether the house is full or empty. You keep the roof, the boiler, the electrics and the pipework.

I'd rather show you the state of it now than dress it up.

Want the full numbers? DM me "LEASE".

23/10/2026

If you're buying UK property from overseas, here's what nobody puts on the brochure:

– Currency: the pound moves, and so do transfer costs
– Finance: fewer lenders and a lower LTV, so more cash in
– Tax: non-resident rules and the overseas stamp duty surcharge
– Distance: you can't pop round to check on it
– Speed: conveyancing can be slow, and property is hard to sell quickly

None of that is a reason not to buy. It's a reason to buy with your eyes open.

How we handle the parts we can: we view and film every house, fix refurb prices upfront, and look after the lease so there's no tenant to manage from abroad.

The tax and finance parts are for your broker and a tax adviser. Please speak to them before you commit.

Overseas and want to talk it through? DM me "LEASE".

22/10/2026

An overseas investor bought their first UK house through us this year: a two-bed terrace in Bootle, secured for £88,000. It took six months to complete, the lender valued it at £84,000, the bathroom was worse than it looked, and the lease came back at one year, not the three we quoted. I've written up every step with the real numbers, what went wrong, and what I'd tell the next buyer before they start.

https://www.manchestersourcing.co.uk/post/bootle-buy-to-let-case-study-smollett-street

22/10/2026

Before and after. Same bathroom, same kitchen, six days apart.

A 2-bed terrace on Smollett Street in Bootle. We completed on 14 August.

What it needed:
– The roof sorted and the gutters cleared
– A new consumer unit
– New floors and carpets
– The bathroom, which was in worse shape than we expected. The old electric shower came out, hot and cold went to the bath taps, and it got a new floor

The first photos are from 3 September, mid-job. The second set is from 9 September, finished. The gas safety certificate came on the 7th.

The day it was finished, it went over to a housing provider to be onboarded.

The honest bit: old terraces hide things. This bathroom needed more work than we planned. What matters is that the investor hears it from us.

Want a house done like this without having to be there? DM me "LEASE".

Address

Manchester

Website

http://www.manchestersourcing.co.uk/

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