Buying a home is an increasingly expensive business, and Manchester’s growth in recent years has been accompanied by frequent worries about the lack of affordable housing.
And with energy bills soaring amid a cost of living crisis, many people will be thinking of ways to cut the amount they spend on housing.
We have now teamed up with our sister title NationalWorld to try to help people in the city looking for something a bit more affordable.
We have sifted through Land Registry data sourced from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to find the areas of Manchester with the lowest average house prices.
Which are the top 10 most affordable areas for buying a house in Manchester?
The 10 areas with the lowest house prices, on average, in Manchester are:
Harpurhey South and Monsall - £121,500.
Abbey Hey - £123,250.
Harpurhey North - £125,000.
Clayton Vale - £130,000.
Beswick, Eastlands and Openshaw Park - £134,250.
Newton Heath - £135,000.
Boothroyden and Higher Blackley - £137,500.
Strangeways - £138,250.
Moston West - £140,000.
Gorton South - £140,000.
The data covers middle layer super output areas (MSOAs), which are used in statistics to divide boroughs into areas with roughly similar numbers of people living in them. MSOAs have populations of between 5,000 and 7,200, and there are 57 of them in Manchester.
The figures show the median price paid in each neighbourhood in the 12 months to June 2021.
What is the current picture for buying houses in Manchester and across the country?
Even with these areas of low prices, overall Manchester remains a difficult place to get on the housing ladder, data suggests.
Mojo Mortgages analysed ONS salary data and the January 2022 property valuation statistics from Zoopla and discovered that first-time buyers in Manchester are looking at having to borrow almost four times their salary.
That put the city 55th in a list of the top 100 least affordable places for those buying their first home.
The average house price in Manchester in last month’s Zoopla data was £235,650.
And in the most desirable neighbourhoods prices are much higher than that, with the NationalWorld analysis of prices in the 12 months up to June 2021 finding Didsbury Village was the city’s least-affordable area with an average price of £390,000.
One glimmer of light for potential homeowners is that Manchester house prices dropped by 1.2% in December.
However, this was not enough to reverse longer-term trends in the city, which has seen an average annual price growth of 5%.
The ONS data for England as a whole suggests that a property purchase will now set you back an average of £288,000, nine times the average full time salary,