Buy to Let in Doncaster: What the Numbers Actually Look Like
Doncaster produces the highest headline yields in my patch and the widest gap between a good street and a bad one. I bought 55 Hunt Lane here at £61,500 against a £70,000 asking price.
Updated 25 August 2026. Written by Connor Blades.
Is Doncaster good for buy to let?
For income, yes. Doncaster is the strongest cashflow market in South Yorkshire, with buy to let properties from around £70,000 and gross yields of 8 to 10% in the DN2, DN4 and DN5 postcodes. Net return on investment after every real cost lands closer to 6 to 8%. The catch is that those numbers are street specific rather than town specific, and the low entry price is doing a lot of the work in the headline figure.
I’m Connor, and Bullseye Properties Ltd is a buyer’s agent working only for the buyer, across South Yorkshire and North Nottinghamshire. Doncaster is where I’ve bought the deal I get asked about most, and also the town where I’ve told the most people not to buy the thing they’d found themselves.
Why do investors look at Doncaster?
Logistics. Doncaster sits where the M18 meets the M180 and the A1(M), with the East Coast Main Line running through it, and that geography turned it into a national distribution point. Amazon operates out of the iPort site south of the town, the rail freight terminal there moves containers inland from the ports, and the wider warehouse belt draws in thousands of shift workers who need affordable housing within a short drive.
ASOS’s distribution operation is close enough to pull from the same labour pool. Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust employs several thousand more, and the town’s college and university centre add to it.
Those workers are the tenant base. They aren’t wealthy, they aren’t transient, and they need a clean three bed within twenty minutes of a warehouse. That’s a very specific demand profile and it’s why the yields are what they are.
The Doncaster Sheffield Airport site is the other part of the story. The airport closed in 2022 and the site has been through a long recommissioning process since. I’d treat any capital growth attributed to it as speculative until planes are actually flying, but the broader investment attention it has pulled into the town is real.
What does a Doncaster buy to let cost, and what does it actually return?
Here’s the typical version. A three bed semi in DN2 at £95,000, letting at £675 a month. Gross yield 8.5%.
Cash going in:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Purchase price | £95,000 |
| Deposit at 25% | £23,750 |
| Stamp duty (additional property rates) | £4,750 |
| Legals and searches | £1,600 |
| Survey | £600 |
| Broker and lender fees | £1,000 |
| Total cash in | £31,700 |
Every month:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Gross rent | £675 |
| Mortgage interest, £71,250 at 4.75% interest only | £282 |
| Management at 10% | £68 |
| Maintenance allowance at 10% | £68 |
| Insurance | £20 |
| Void allowance, one month in 12 | £56 |
| Net monthly | £181 |
£181 a month is £2,172 a year, which on £31,700 of cash is a 6.9% return on investment.
Notice the void allowance. I’ve used one month in twelve for Doncaster where I’d use one in twenty four for Sheffield, because tenant turnover here is genuinely higher and pretending otherwise makes the spreadsheet look good and the bank account look worse. That single line takes about 1.7 percentage points off the return. It’s the line most people leave out.
8.5% gross became 6.9% net. That’s still a strong number and it’s honestly why people buy here. My fee sits on top of the cash in figure and is agreed in writing before I start, which is set out on what it costs.
What does a below market Doncaster purchase look like in practice?
55 Hunt Lane in Bentley, DN5. Asking price £70,000. I bought it for £61,500 for an overseas investor who never set foot in the country. It lets at £650 a month, a 12.7% gross yield.
Bought with cash, which is how that one was done:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Purchase price | £61,500 |
| Stamp duty | £3,075 |
| Legals and searches | £1,600 |
| Survey | £600 |
| Total cash in | £66,775 |
| Rent | £650 per month |
| Management, maintenance, insurance and voids | £204 per month |
| Net monthly | £446 |
| Annual net | £5,352 |
| Return on cash invested | 8.0% |
A cash purchase gives a lower return on investment than a leveraged one when the deal works, because leverage amplifies a good return. It also removes the mortgage from the risk model entirely, which is what that buyer wanted. Different goals, different structure. The full breakdown is on the Hunt Lane case study.
One practical warning that comes up constantly in Doncaster: at £61,500 a 75% loan to value (LTV) mortgage would have been £46,125, and most buy to let lenders won’t go below a £50,000 loan or a £75,000 property value. A lot of the cheapest Doncaster stock is effectively cash only. Find that out before you offer, not after.
Which Doncaster postcodes work for buy to let?
DN5, Bentley
Employment proximity, low entry prices, and reasonable yields. Bentley is where Hunt Lane is, and it’s the postcode I know best. Terraced stock, mostly pre war, mostly needing an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) uplift. Parts of Bentley sit on the flood plain and flooded badly in 2007 and again in 2019, so the flood check here isn’t optional.
DN4, Balby and Hexthorpe
Strong working tenant demand and some of the best price to rent ratios in the town. It also needs the most street level vetting of anywhere I buy. Some Balby streets let in a week to good tenants. Others are two minutes’ walk away and behave completely differently. I won’t put a DN4 property forward without having stood on the street, at more than one time of day.
DN2, Wheatley and Intake
Solid working tenant base, a bit more owner occupation on the streets, slightly higher entry prices and lower drama. If you’re buying in Doncaster from a distance and you want the smaller variance, this is where I’d point you.
Rossington and the southern villages
Worth a mention because of the iPort proximity. I’ve sourced on King Georges Road in Rossington. Village stock, employment on the doorstep, and a tenant pool that stays put.
Where would I not buy in Doncaster?
The cheapest streets in DN1, the town centre, without genuinely thorough street level due diligence. The prices there look extraordinary on a portal and there’s usually a reason.
There’s a version of this business that just buys the highest yielding thing available and lets the tenant quality look after itself. I’ve seen the properties that come out of it. There are streets in this town I wouldn’t let my dog live on, and they probably wouldn’t go up in value either. That’s the honest summary of the bottom of the Doncaster market.
Crime here is highly postcode specific and, more than that, street specific. Area level statistics will actively mislead you: a DN4 average tells you nothing about the road you’re buying on. Police.uk street level data, a physical visit, and a look at how many properties on the road are boarded or have absentee landlords. That’s the check.
Who rents in Doncaster and how bad is the void risk?
Warehouse and distribution staff, hospital workers, care staff, drivers, and a good number of families on long tenancies who have rented in the same area for years. The demand is real and it’s constant. Doncaster does not have a shortage of tenants.
What it has is a shortage of good tenants on certain streets, which shows up as arrears and turnover rather than as empty months. That’s why I model a void month a year and a full 10% maintenance allowance here. Shift workers move when the shift pattern moves. A property twenty minutes from the warehouse belt with parking and a decent kitchen lets fast and holds. A property that needs work, on a street with a reputation, sits.
Get the street right and Doncaster void risk is unremarkable. Get it wrong and no yield figure will save the deal.
Is Doncaster a cashflow market or a growth market?
Cashflow, and you should go in knowing what that costs you on the other side. Here’s the comparison in full, based on a £115,000 property.
Option 1 is a high yield, high crime area: 8% return on investment, £300 a month net, and capital growth around 1% a year on House Price Index evidence. Option 2 is a better area with slower income: 6% return, £150 a month net, growth in the 4 to 6% range.
| Option 1 (8% + 1%) | Option 2 (6% + 5%) | Option 2 advantage | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 5 | £23,866 | £40,772 | +£16,906 |
| Year 10 | £48,032 | £90,323 | +£42,291 |
| Year 15 | £72,511 | £151,077 | +£78,565 |
| Year 20 | £97,322 | £226,129 | +£128,807 |
Option 1 pays out £72,000 of cashflow across twenty years and the property grows by £25,322. Option 2 pays out £36,000 and grows by £190,129. The cashflow difference is £36,000 in Option 1’s favour. The capital difference is £164,807 the other way.
Doncaster is not uniformly Option 1. The better DN2 and DN5 streets behave much closer to the middle. But if you buy the highest yielding thing in the town you are buying Option 1, and you should do that deliberately rather than by accident. If you want the growth end of the trade, Sheffield is the answer and the yield will be three points lower.
Neither column is wrong. If you’re retired and you need £300 a month now, twenty year compounding is an abstraction. That’s a real answer for a real person and I’m not going to talk anyone out of it.
What should you watch out for in Doncaster?
Crime, at street level. Not postcode level. This is the single biggest determinant of whether a Doncaster deal works and it cannot be done from a desk 200 miles away.
Flood risk. The Don and the Torne run through the town and Bentley, Fishlake and Toll Bar have all flooded within living memory. Check the Environment Agency map, then check what the insurance quote actually is, because an uninsurable or expensive-to-insure property is a resale problem as well as a running cost.
HMO oversupply. Doncaster already has more House in Multiple Occupation (HMO) stock than the professional tenant demand supports. The yields look wonderful on paper. Void rates on the weaker rooms don’t. I wouldn’t over leverage into that strategy here.
Lender minimums. As above. Below roughly £75,000 purchase price you’re often looking at a cash buy.
EPC. Large amounts of pre 1919 terrace with solid walls. An EPC below C is common. Price the upgrade into the offer.
Airport speculation. Don’t pay a premium today for a capital growth story that depends on the Doncaster Sheffield Airport site reopening. If it happens, treat it as upside you didn’t pay for.
How much deposit do you need for a Doncaster buy to let?
25% of the purchase price, so £17,500 on a £70,000 property and £25,000 on a £100,000 one, assuming you can get a mortgage on it at all at the lower end. Add stamp duty at the additional property rates, legals, searches, a survey and lender fees. On the £95,000 example above those extras came to £7,950 on top of the £23,750 deposit.
How I buy in Doncaster
The work here is almost entirely in the filtering. Anyone can find an 11% gross yield on a Doncaster portal listing in ten minutes. Knowing which of those eleven percents is real, and which one comes with a tenant who leaves in five months and a road that will still be worth £80,000 in 2035, is the whole job.
So I view in person, at different times of day where the street warrants it, and I run crime, flood, title, EPC and comparable sales before anything reaches you. Most of what I look at gets discarded. Then I negotiate, paid a fixed fee by you and nothing by the seller, which is why the Hunt Lane number ended up at £61,500 rather than £70,000. There’s more in the case studies and in how it works.
Send me a Doncaster listing you’re considering and I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.
Connor, Bullseye Properties Ltd