Case study · 12 Warbreck Avenue, Liverpool L9
12 Warbreck Avenue: a ready-to-rent house stripped back for double the value
The counter-intuitive one. This house was already refurbished, clean and ready to rent — you could have got a mortgage on it and let it as a buy-to-let the week it completed. Doing that would have been the obvious move and the wrong one.
The numbers
| Purchase price | £126,500 | |
|---|---|---|
| Works | ~£70,000 | |
| Total invested | ~£196,500 | |
| Valuation on completion | £250,000 | |
| Gross rent | £3,800 / month | |
| Configuration | 6 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms | bought as four rooms |
Strategy: Strip and reconfigure a lettable property into a six-bed, five-bathroom HMO
What made it work
- It was ready to let on day one. The decision to strip a perfectly good property back and reconfigure it is the entire case study — a buy-to-let here would have produced a fraction of £3,800 a month.
- The loft was almost a room already and needed very little; converting it to an ensuite added value out of proportion to what it cost.
- Five bathrooms for six bedrooms, not six. The space would not allow another, and that ratio is exactly what separates this project’s valuation from the L4 one on this site, which has three bathrooms for six rooms.
- The patio was large enough to signal an extension. It was not used — the value came from inside the existing walls, as it does on nearly every project here.
The full walkthrough, in Noel’s words
Transcribed from the video and edited for readability. One correction: the video says the final valuation was "£150,000". That was a misspeak — the correct figure, confirmed by Noel and stated in the video’s own description, is £250,000, and the transcript below reads as intended.
Welcome to another success study of one of our properties in Liverpool. My name is Noel Cardona — an author, an entrepreneur, and an investor in the area myself.
This property is at 12 Warbreck Avenue, in L9. It is a semi-detached house that was sold with four rooms and converted into six bedrooms and five bathrooms. It is an important asset for this investor, and you will see why when you get to the numbers — it performs considerably better than it would have as a buy-to-let.
This was the layout as the property was bought. The kitchen was small, so it had to be enlarged to comply with the regulations on communal areas — an important part of this process. We also moved some walls to make one of the bedrooms and one of the bathrooms bigger, again to meet the regulations.
Look at the pictures of the property as it was bought. It had been refurbished by somebody in order to sell it. It was clean, in very good condition, and we could have rented it exactly as it was. It was ready to let as a buy-to-let, and you could have obtained a mortgage on it that week. We decided instead to strip the property and reconfigure it, because that way we could achieve considerably more value than a buy-to-let would ever have produced.
The property was in good shape throughout. The kitchen was not luxurious but it was perfectly usable. The patio was large for a property of this type, and signalled a possible extension while still leaving outside space.
There was only one bathroom in the whole house. Some areas were tired, but again — it could have been let as it was.
Upstairs, the loft was almost ready to be a room and needed very little. We changed everything the tenants actually use: the bathrooms, the mirrors, the fittings. We have five bathrooms rather than six; we would have liked another, but the space did not allow it, so there is one shared bathroom. Each room has the beds and fittings tenants need, and the loft was converted into an ensuite, which increased the value of the property considerably.
This property is now a tremendous asset for the investors, with a final valuation of £250,000 and a monthly cashflow of about £3,800. We could have simply let it as a buy-to-let — but because we know how to add value, we can achieve numbers like these.
If you want a property that does this, we source and develop them in Liverpool and the Wirral, and manage them afterwards. Or run your own numbers first on the buy-to-let calculator — free, no sign-up.