Terraced streets dominate here — long red-brick rows that sell fast and cheap by national standards, punctuated by the odd semi and, further out, a scattering of detached houses. It's a city of front doors that open straight onto the pavement, corner shops, and the kind of density that comes from a place built for dockworkers and their families and never quite rebuilt around cars. The property picture tells you most of what you need to know before you even look at a school catchment. This is freehold territory — nearly two-thirds of sales are freehold houses rather than leasehold flats — and terraces are the default, with a median price around £150,000, which undercuts the national terrace price by a wide margin and puts Liverpool among the more affordable big cities to actually own something with a garden. Flats follow the same pattern, selling for roughly half the national flat price. On schooling, the sample is mixed rather than uniformly reassuring: a Good-rated Catholic primary sits alongside an academy flagged as requiring improvement, and several schools have no published Ofsted judgement at all, but Smithdown Primary School and Archbishop Blanch CofE High School carry Outstanding ratings if you want to anchor a move around them. Rail access is genuinely useful for a city this size — Wavertree Technology Park, Broad Green, Edge Hill, Mossley Hill and West Allerton stations between them mean most residents aren't far from a line into town, even if none of these are the flashy city-centre terminus. Crime is the number that needs naming plainly rather than dressed up: violence and sexual offences account for well over a third of all recorded crime, easily the largest single category, followed by drugs and public order offences. That's a heavier skew toward violent and public-order incidents than you'd want to wave away, and it's worth weighing against the affordability that makes the terraces so appealing in the first place — this is the trade-off at the centre of any decision about Liverpool. Burglary and vehicle crime, by contrast, sit relatively low in the mix, which matters if what worries you is someone breaking into your house rather than trouble on the street. Green space per head runs a little below both the regional and national averages, so this isn't a city of sprawling parks on every corner, though pockets of it exist and get used hard when the weather allows. Who ends up here tends to be people prioritising space and ownership over polish — first-time buyers stretching a deposit further than they could in the South, families drawn to a specific school despite a patchy borough-wide picture, commuters who value five separate stations over one glamorous one. It rewards people who do their homework street by street rather than trusting the city's reputation wholesale, and it will not suit anyone whose primary anxiety is street-level safety, because that's the one area where the data asks you to look hard before you sign anything.