You’ll never find good refurb deals on Rightmove. There just aren’t enough properties out there that need a refurb. There’s far too much competition. And in any case, most properties needing a refurb don’t even make it onto Rightmove, because the estate agent either keeps them for himself or passes them on to other clients or their preferred buyers.
If you’ve been in property long enough, you’ll have heard that kind of comment over and over again. And as far as I’m concerned, none of it is true. There are plenty of good deals on Rightmove, and there are plenty of refurbs, if you just know how to look for them and you’re prepared to put the effort into finding them.
The best way I can prove it to you is by telling you about a property I bought a few years ago, which I found on Rightmove and which ended up being almost the perfect deal.
The house I found on Rightmove
It was a four bedroom mid-terraced house in Nottingham, in an area I’d always been interested in. I thought it looked like a great place for buy to lets: a very rentable area, decent rents, cheaper properties but a good area. And when I found this one, there was just something about it that made me think, that’s an interesting property.
The funny thing is that I wasn’t even planning to buy it. My son-in-law had told me he wanted to be a property investor, and he’d asked whether I’d mentor him in a very relaxed and informal way. I’d said yes, sure. And then he rang me one day to say, you’re meant to be my mentor, but you haven’t actually given me anything to do. He was absolutely right. I’d been neglecting him.
So I said, give me a few minutes and I’ll ring you back. I jumped on Rightmove, had a quick scroll through the area that interests me, and this particular property caught my eye. For the life of me I can’t tell you why. I sent him the link and said, make an appointment, go and have a look, and tell me what you think. That was his homework. And then I forgot all about it.
The phone call from the viewing
A few days later my son-in-law rang from the property, sounding very excited. The agent wanted to take it off the market, he said. There’d been a leak nobody knew about, and some of the walls and ceilings were damp and stained. The agent was about to ring the seller and tell them to take it off, get the work done, and put it back on later.
Suddenly the property had become a lot more interesting. I said, hang on. Tell the agent we’ll make an offer now, as seen, with all the damage. That way the seller doesn’t have to take it off the market or do the work, the agent doesn’t have to wait for it to come back on before he sells it, and everybody can still get a sale now. Otherwise the agent is going to spend the next couple of months sorting out repairs for the seller, and he may not even get a sale at the end of it.
My son-in-law asked how much to offer. Now, bear in mind I hadn’t seen the property. All I’d seen was a few pictures on Rightmove and the asking price, which was £140,000. So I said, oh, I don’t know, offer them £115,000 and we’ll see what happens. I want to be clear that figure was made up off the top of my head. There was no science behind it. I assumed it would be rejected out of hand, but it would be enough to start a negotiation.
Ten minutes later my son-in-law rang back to say, great news, we’ve agreed the deal. £118,500. I was totally amazed, and I still wasn’t really believing it was happening.
Going to see what I’d agreed to buy
As part of his mentorship I asked my son-in-law to go and find the finance, which he did, using private finance and JV funds. He also borrowed enough to cover legal fees, stamp duty and the refurb, which from his description and photos I assumed would be at least £5,000, possibly more. And again I forgot all about it.
Until about two weeks before completion, when it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t even been to see the property I was about to own. I know that sounds strange, but I was very busy and distracted at the time and, as I say, I never expected this to get anywhere. So I rang the agents, arranged to pick up the keys because it was empty, and went round.
Sure enough, there was damp staining on the bedroom ceilings and about half an inch of water on the bathroom floor. The two top bedrooms were in the roof space with roof lights, and when I stuck my head out of one I could see a few slipped slates on the rear slope. That was where the rain was coming in. As so often happens, the damage was totally out of proportion to the work and money needed to put it right.
But nobody had done anything about the roof since our offer was accepted, and we’d had about two weeks of torrential rain. It looked much worse than my son-in-law’s photos. I took some pictures, sent them to him and asked, is this how it looked when you inspected it? He came straight back: no, that looks much worse.
Going back for another £5,000
I told him to go back to the agents, send them my photos, and ask for another £5,000 off to cover the damage, because at this stage I was thinking we’d have to re-plaster ceilings, hack plaster off walls and redecorate throughout. It had started to look like quite a big job.
The seller was very unhappy and said they wanted to take it off the market again. So I said to my son-in-law, tell the agents: if you take it off the market, you’ll have to get the work done, you’ll have to wait, and you’ll have to remarket it. Is that really what you and the seller want? A couple of days later, once everybody had had a chance to think about it, I got the call. They’d agreed a discount. We were back down to the £115,000 we’d first thought of.
What the refurb actually cost
A week or so later we completed. I’d been expecting a major roof overhaul, but the roofer came round and said all it needed was three missing slates replacing. I’d been expecting a lot of replastering. But it all dried out quite quickly, and we were able to redecorate. The redecoration was done by a contact of my son-in-law and cost next to nothing. The only other things on the list were a new hob for the kitchen and a new back gate, which didn’t cost a lot either.
When I totted it all up, the whole refurb cost about £2,500, not the £10,000 or more I’d been fearing. With the purchase price, stamp duty, legal fees and the refurb, the total cost of acquiring the property was only about £122,500.
Getting all my money back out
My son-in-law let the property to somebody he knew. I’ll admit I was a little doubtful, but he turned out to be a great tenant and stayed for several years. After six months I went to my mortgage broker to arrange a mortgage. The market was taking a bit of a dip at the time, and I was sure the valuation would come in lower than I needed.
A couple of weeks after the valuer went round, my broker rang and said, guess how much they valued the property at? Feeling a bit gloomy about the market, I said £115,000, on the basis that surely they couldn’t value it for less than we’d paid. But he said no, good news. They’d valued it at £168,000.
A 75% mortgage on £168,000 is £126,000. After broker fees and the legal fees for arranging the mortgage, the bank sent £123,355, against the roughly £122,500 we had spent on the property. So we had all of our money back out, enough to pay off the private finance my son-in-law had arranged, and we still owned the house.
So can you find refurb deals on Rightmove?
The point I’m really trying to make is that I didn’t get lucky on a secret deal. This wasn’t some special off-market deal I found through my network, my secret deal packager or my property sourcer. It was a house publicly advertised on Rightmove for anybody to see and anybody to find. There was nothing in the listing that said there’d been a leak, and no reason to anticipate it when I first saw the property.
The reason we found this opportunity is that somebody went to look at the property, and somebody was there to talk to the estate agent. If my son-in-law hadn’t gone, as I’d asked him to, if he’d looked at the photos and said well, there’s no point, that property is obviously worth £140,000, there’s no deal to be done, we would never have done it.
So when somebody tells you with great authority that there aren’t enough properties needing a refurb, or that the good ones never get listed, go and look at what’s actually on the market. Go and view them. Talk to the agents. Then find out whether there’s a deal to be done. When you put in the time to do the research, to go and view the properties and meet the agents, you will find deals. The deals are there. In fact, great deals aren’t found, they’re created.
If you’re serious about renovating property for profit, or you want to renovate property to rent out and keep, I’ve just updated my complete course, The Successful Property Renovator’s Workshop. It covers everything I think you need to know, from how to find the right projects and do the figures, to how much to pay for the property and the refurb, how to find and manage builders (which I’m always told is very difficult), and how to make sure you make a profit every time. It’s all based on over 150 of my own refurb projects over the last 30 years.
Here’s to successful property renovating.
Peter Jones
Author, property investor and ex-Chartered Surveyor
P.S By the way, I’ve completely rewritten and updated my course for 2026, The Successful Property Renovator’s Workshop — a comprehensive guide to renovating properties properly and profitably, based on my own experience across well over 150 projects over thirty years.
thepropertyteacher.co.uk/the-successful-property-renovators-workshop
