Is renovation cheaper than buying a house?

Yes, for most of the families we work with in South East London, renovating works out cheaper than buying the finished equivalent. The premium a done house commands over an unmodernised one on the same street is usually bigger than the cost of the work, and moving piles stamp duty, agent fees, legal fees and removals on top. That is money that buys you nothing physical.

Renovating also buys exactly what you want. Purchase a finished house and you pay full price for someone else's kitchen and someone else's layout. Clients in Dulwich and Beckenham who priced up a move and then extended instead tell us the same thing: a kitchen extension (from £2,500 per square metre, with a typical 20 square metre single-storey from £55,000) or a dormer loft conversion (from £50,000) got them the space they were moving for, without leaving a street and schools they liked.

Buying wins when the house cannot give you what you need. If the plot will not take an extension, the roof geometry kills a loft, or the area itself is the problem, no renovation budget fixes that. We will say so at the survey stage if the sums point towards moving. A fixed written quote gives you a hard number to weigh against the full cost of a move, rather than guessing at both sides.