Volume leader, not score leader
Birmingham currently has the largest number of active listings of any city PropertyAlert tracks — 673 — with 64 scoring 7 or above on investment score. That's a genuinely large pool of opportunity, even though its average score (3.82) sits behind the North's top performers. Scale matters as much as average discount: more listings means more chances to find a specific deal that fits your criteria.
Coventry: smaller, but comparable quality
Coventry's 175 active listings average a 3.63 investment score, with 16 currently scoring 7 or above — a smaller pool than Birmingham's but a broadly similar quality distribution, worth including in any Midlands-wide search rather than defaulting to the bigger city alone.
Leicester, Derby and Nottingham: currently the weakest data in the region
All three currently show meaningfully lower average scores — Leicester and Derby both at 2.47, Nottingham at 2.26 — with single-digit counts of listings scoring 7 or above in Derby (6) and Nottingham (6). That doesn't mean there's nothing worth finding in these markets, but it does mean the current supply of genuinely discounted stock is thinner than in Birmingham or Coventry, and search effort may be better rewarded elsewhere in the region right now.
Reading this data correctly
A lower city-wide average doesn't rule out individual strong deals — it means you'll need to search more listings to find them. Use investment score to prioritise where to focus, not as a reason to skip a city entirely.