There is no shortage of cheap property in Britain.

Open any property portal, sort by price and you can quickly find something that looks like a bargain. The difficulty is working out whether it is actually a good investment.

Price, after all, is only one number.

A property can be cheap because it sits in an area with weak rental demand, poor transport connections, declining population or little prospect of economic growth. Alternatively, it can be cheap because the market simply has not caught up with what is happening around it.

Those are two very different propositions…. Also, cheap isn't necessarily good value.

Property investors have spent decades chasing the same basic metric: buy low, rent high and sell higher. But the gap between cheap and good value is where things get interesting.

A £100,000 property generating strong rent in a declining market may look attractive today. A £200,000 property in a growing city with rising employment, constrained housing supply and major infrastructure investment might have considerably more going for it over the long term.

The second property costs more. That does not necessarily make it more expensive in investment terms.

Look at what is happening around the property

This is where location becomes more complicated than a postcode.

A good investment market tends to have several things working together. Population growth. Employment. Transport. Universities. New businesses. Housing demand. Regeneration.

None of these guarantees capital growth or rental performance. Together, however, they can provide a much stronger underlying rationale for demand.

Research from CBRE, Knight Frank and Savills regularly examines these wider economic and demographic forces when assessing UK property markets. It is why experienced investors often spend as much time researching a city as they do researching an apartment.

Regeneration can change the calculation

Regeneration is particularly interesting because it can alter the fundamentals of an area. New public spaces, transport links, commercial developments, universities and residential schemes can gradually change how a neighbourhood is used and perceived.

Liverpool provides a useful example. Major regeneration across the city has created new residential, commercial and leisure districts, while Manchester and Salford have undergone similarly significant transformation over the past two decades.

The interesting question for an investor is not simply where regeneration has already happened. It is where it is still happening. The spreadsheet needs a street view. There is nothing wrong with analysing yields, purchase prices and rental forecasts. Investors should do exactly that.

But numbers work best when accompanied by context.

Look at the local economy. Look at population trends. Look at transport. Look at development pipelines. Look at who actually wants to live there…then look at the property. A cheap property might give you a cheap property. A well-positioned property in a growing market gives you something considerably more useful: a reason to believe demand will still be there in ten years. And that, ultimately, is what makes good value harder to find than a bargain.