Property prices in Liverpool

Homes that changed hands in the Liverpool area over the last twelve months averaged £132,150. Asking prices are opinions; completed sales are evidence, so this is the figure to argue from when you are buying, selling or refinancing.

Across the same twelve months completed sales are 11.3% lower than a year earlier. Over five years they are 76.9% higher than five years earlier, which is the period most landlords actually hold a property for.

Liverpool is a city of about half a million people on the Mersey, with two universities in the centre, a large teaching hospital and one of the biggest student and young professional rental markets outside London. Letting demand is spread across the Georgian streets around the centre, the family suburbs to the south and the terraces to the north, so rents and yields differ sharply from one postcode district to the next.

The type of home matters more than almost anything else in Liverpool, because the city holds everything from apartment blocks near the water to large semi-detached houses in the southern suburbs. The table shows the twelve month average for each type we hold enough completed sales for, with the number of sales behind each figure so you can see how firm it is.

Across the area homes sell at about £251 per square foot. Price per square foot is the honest 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.

District matters twice over for a landlord: it sets what you pay and it sets what you can charge. The districts below are the Liverpool 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.

Gross yields around the centre of Liverpool read about 8.1%: rent for a year measured against what the home is worth. That is comfortably above what the same money buys in the south of England, which is why Liverpool draws landlords from across the country and from abroad.

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 a city.

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