Property prices in Birmingham

Over the last twelve months a home in the Birmingham area sold for £166,900 on average, which sets the ceiling on what any valuation can claim.

Across the last twelve months completed sales are 28.7% lower than a year earlier. Over five years they are 22.7% lower than five years earlier, which is closer to the period most landlords actually hold a property for.

Birmingham is the largest rental market outside London and spreads across suburbs with very different price levels. Family houses in the south and city centre flats behave almost like separate markets.

District matters twice over for a landlord: it sets what you pay and it sets what you can charge. The districts below are the Birmingham postcode areas with enough homes advertised to give a fair rental average, which is the side of the sum most buyers guess at.

Put the two halves together before you buy: the rent a district actually achieves against the price a district actually commands. That is the yield, and it is the only number that tells you whether a purchase works.

In Birmingham the gap between property types is wider than the gap between many districts, which the table below sets out. The number of sales behind each figure is shown beside it, so you can see how firm it is before you lean on it.

Across the area homes sell at about £317 per square foot. Price per square foot is the fairest way to compare two homes of different sizes on the same street, and it is the first thing a surveyor looks at. If a home is priced well above the local figure per square foot, something else is paying for it: a garden, a recent extension, or an owner's hope.

The table below is the price series our data supplier holds for the area, one row a year, with the movement across each year beside it. It is the same series the valuation on your own report is anchored against, which is why a report can say what your home is worth today from what it sold for years ago.

A trend is a description of the past, not a promise. What it is genuinely useful for is a sanity check: if the price you are being asked to pay assumes a rise the last five years never delivered, you are buying someone else's optimism.

Around 5% gross is what the Birmingham figures give for rent measured against value today.

Gross yield is not what you keep. Out of it come management, safety certificates, insurance, repairs and any empty weeks between tenants. The report on your own address sets the rent it can achieve against what the home is worth, so you are looking at your property rather than an area.

If you already own here and want the running of it taken off your hands, the management page for Birmingham sets out what a high street agent charges on the area's real average rent against what Caso charges for the same work.