54 Kensington, in Liverpool L7, is on the market at £160,000. The listing calls it "a ready made Airbnb investment opportunity". Good pictures, and a fair price for Merseyside.

When you are looking at property, it is always very important to look for a reason to say no. Not a reason to say yes. Anyone can find one of those. The seller has already written you several.

So here is what happened when I went looking for one on this particular house, and how long it took. A few minutes, and it cost nothing.

The listing contradicts itself in its own second line

Read the next line of that same advert and it describes six letting rooms, each with its own en-suite shower and WC, a communal lounge and two kitchens.

That is not an Airbnb. That is an HMO, described by the seller in their own words, in the advert that is selling it to you as something else.

And it matters more than it sounds. If they are running it as an HMO because the Airbnb is not working, and you buy it to run as an Airbnb, it probably is not going to work for you either. The strategy on the tin is not the strategy in the building.

Seven applications against the address. Every one refused.

So I opened the council's public planning register and searched the street, then counted the decisions against 54 and 56 Kensington. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Seven applications, and not one of them granted. Some were full planning applications to change the use into two seven-bedroom HMOs. Others were certificates of lawfulness, asking the council to simply accept the use that was already there. At about £1,500 an application, that is more than £10,000 somebody has already spent trying to make this property work.

Why did all seven fail? Because the area sits in a restricted zone, where running a house as an HMO needs full planning permission. That is not bad luck, and it is not a paperwork problem you can solve with a better agent.

It means the next buyer will not get it either. Six en-suite rooms you cannot get consent for is not an investment. It is a very expensive house.

The register is where the seller's reason lives

None of that was in the pitch. All of it was sitting in a public register that anybody can search, for free, before they offer.

This is the part I want you to take away. The listing is the seller's story about the property. The register is what actually happened to it. When those two disagree, the register is the one telling you the truth, and it is usually explaining why the property is for sale at all.

Check and verify everything they tell you.

What I said in the video

When you are looking for property, it is always very important, and almost always you need to look for a reason to say no. There are tools to investigate and to do your due diligence that you need to understand, to try to find a reason to say no. Sometimes it is unclear, but you still need to do your pre-due diligence, and you need to check and verify everything they tell you.

In this case I am going to show you a little bit of pre-due diligence, to try to understand why they are selling this property, and whether that is a good reason to buy it. They are selling it for £160,000, it is located in Merseyside, L7, and what they say is that this is a ready-made Airbnb.

If you look at the pictures, yes, it is a nice property. But the pictures do not seem to be an Airbnb. Maybe they have been using it more like an HMO. And the problem is that if they are using it as an HMO because Airbnb is not working, and you buy it for Airbnb, probably it is not going to work for you either. As an HMO you might not be able to get a licence, and these people, I believe, were not able to.

This is number 54, and you can see how many times they have tried to get this as an HMO. This is one, this is two, three, four, five, six, seven. So somebody has done a lot of effort to try to get this as an HMO seven times. That is more than £10,000 in fees, and they have not achieved it. The reason they have not achieved it is because this area is in a restricted zone, where getting HMO licences requires full planning.

Therefore you probably will not be able to get it done either. So if you are trying to invest with this strategy in mind, you are going to have a big problem. Due diligence is very, very powerful, very important, very much necessary.

Questions people ask about this

Do you need planning permission for an HMO?

It depends entirely on where the property is. In many areas a small HMO is permitted development, and you deal only with licensing. But where the council has restricted that, as it has in this part of Liverpool, a change of use to an HMO needs full planning permission — and if the council does not want another HMO on that street, you will not get it. Licensing and planning are two separate consents from two separate departments, and you need both. Check the restriction before you offer, not after.

How do I check a property's planning history before I offer?

Every council in England publishes a planning register online, and it is free to search. Put in the street and the postcode rather than just the house number, because a conversion is often applied for as a pair of addresses, and because the neighbours' decisions tell you what the council thinks of that street. Read the decision column, not just the application. Seven refusals on one address is a pattern, and a pattern is an answer.

What is a certificate of lawfulness?

It is an application asking the council to confirm that a use or a piece of work is already lawful, usually because it has been there long enough or did not need consent in the first place. Investors reach for it when they cannot get planning. When you see certificates of lawfulness refused alongside refused planning applications on the same building, you are looking at somebody who has tried both routes and been turned down on both.

Is a "ready made Airbnb" listing worth buying?

Sometimes, but the phrase is doing a lot of work and it is worth pulling apart. Ask what the property is actually set up as, what it is actually being run as today, and what the council will actually let you run it as. On this one the answers were three different things. A property advertised with a strategy already attached is a property where somebody else has tested that strategy, and you want to know how that went before you pay for the privilege of repeating it.

Do this before your next offer

Pick the property you are closest to buying right now and go and search its council planning register. Ten minutes. If nothing comes back, you have lost ten minutes. If something does, you have just saved yourself a great deal more than that.

And if you want the calculators and tools I use to check a deal before I offer on it, that is what the UK Property Investor Toolkit is. Fifteen tools, and it is 99p, which is just the shipping for the physical toolkit we post out to you.