Ground Floor Shop, 62 Bucks Road, Douglas, IM1 3AE
Description
Successful café business available to rent in the heart of Douglas, currently operating as "Froth" which benefits from high footfall and a prime central location. This well-established retail unit is spread over 2 floors, offering a spacious and versatile layout. The property comprises of a ground floor café/restaurant seating area, additional customer seating downstairs, a fully equipped kitchen, and a store room. The lease, business, fittings and equipment are all included for £30,000 Per Annum, making this an excellent turnkey opportunity for anyone looking to step into a thriving hospitality business.
A phone number or email address in the agent’s own wording has been removed. This site publishes contact details for nobody — not the agents, not the firms it lists, not its own operator — so that no one gets a direct line on a page that treats them all the same. Their full text, including how to reach them, is on their own listing, linked above.
‹ Back to searchNot marked as sole agency on the original listing, so this property may also be marketed by other agents not captured in this data.
Nearby
- SchoolSaint Thomas' Church of England School0.26 mi · 6 min walk · 1 min drive
- GP surgeryFinch Hill Health Centre0.18 mi · 4 min walk · 1 min drive
- DentistA D Hewett0.06 mi · 1 min walk · 0 min drive
- SupermarketAsia's Best Choice0.27 mi · 6 min walk · 1 min drive
- PubThe Prospect Hotel0.22 mi · 5 min walk · 1 min drive
- RestaurantEnzo's0.03 mi · 1 min walk · 0 min drive
- CaféFroth0.00 mi · 0 min walk · 0 min drive
- Petrol stationBrown Bobby0.40 mi · 9 min walk · 1 min drive
- AirportIsle of Man Airport9.7 mi · 31 min drive
Nearest match in each category, from a fixed list of Isle of Man amenities — not every pub, café or shop on the island, so treat this as a useful sample, not a complete picture. Distances are straight-line ("as the crow flies"), multiplied by 1.3 to approximate real road-network distance — this is an estimate, not turn-by-turn routing, and actual walking/driving routes may differ. Times assume constant average speeds appropriate to the Isle of Man's roads and 25/35mph limits: walking 4.5 km/h, cycling 14 km/h, driving 30 km/h — not open-road speeds, and they don't account for traffic, parking or terrain.
Masts nearby
- Mobile phone mastManx Telecom202 yards away
- Mobile phone mastSure202 yards away
- Communication mastUnnamed on the map0.47 miles away
- Mobile phone mastManx Telecom0.76 miles away
Read this before drawing a conclusion. These are masts mapped by OpenStreetMap contributors — 38 communication structures for the whole island, 29 of them tagged as carrying a mobile network. The operators run considerably more sites than that, so a mast not shown here is not evidence there isn't one. There is no official Isle of Man mast register to check against: Ofcom's Sitefinder never covered the island and the Communications Commission publishes no list. Nothing in this data says which generation a mast carries, so none of it can tell you whether a site is 5G.
What would improving it be worth?
Value added is the extra floor area priced at £3,229/m² — the midpoint asking price per m² among 6 Douglas properties currently for sale that publish a floor area. Cost uses real Isle of Man build rates: £4,000–£6,000/m² new build and £2,000–£4,000/m² refurbishment, depending on quality. Net is against the mid rate. The last column is how often Isle of Man actually grants that kind of application.
| Improvement | Value it might add | Likely cost | Net | Granted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Add a bedroom (single-storey extension) A modest double plus circulation, built new. ~14 m² |
£45,207 | £52,500 14 m² · mid spec new build range £42,000–£63,000 |
−£7,293 | 0% (314) |
| Loft conversion with a bedroom Works inside an existing roof, so it prices as refurbishment rather than new build — which is why it usually wins. ~20 m² |
£64,582 | £41,000 20 m² · mid spec refurb range £33,000–£50,000 |
+£23,582 | 0% (46) |
| Two-storey extension Roughly 14 m² on each of two floors. ~28 m² |
£90,415 | £105,000 28 m² · mid spec new build range £84,000–£126,000 |
−£14,585 | 0% (66) |
| Garage, annexe or outbuilding Detached space is worth less per m² than main-house floor area. ~18 m² |
£34,874 | £67,500 18 m² · mid spec new build range £54,000–£81,000 |
−£32,626 | 0% (199) |
Two things it cannot see. First, it prices floor area at the local average rate — it doesn't know your plot, your roof, your outlook, or whether an extension is physically possible; nor whether your street has a ceiling price that no amount of extending beats. Second, the rate comes from asking prices of other properties currently for sale, because the Isle of Man's sold register records no floor areas at all — so it reflects what sellers ask, not what buyers paid.
The obvious alternative method is worse, which is why it isn't used here: comparing a typical 3-bed with a typical 4-bed suggests a bedroom is worth around £430,000 island-wide. It isn't — a 4-bed is generally a bigger house on a bigger plot, so that figure measures the mix of what's for sale, not the value of adding a room.
Before spending anything, get a builder's quote and talk to an architect — what work of this kind actually gets approved here shows how often applications like yours succeed, and on what grounds the refusals go.
Building work on this property
Same estimate model this site uses on its planning pages (UK cost ranges with the Isle of Man's 18% uplift) — a rough starting point, not a quote. Always get quotes from an Isle of Man builder before budgeting.
See also all Isle of Man property professionals — architects, surveyors, mortgage brokers and trades.
Sale history
| Sale date | Price | At 2026 prices | Address on register |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-04-12 | £100,000 | £148,625 +49% | Ground Floor Shop Clybane Court Farmhill Douglas IM2 2NF |
| 2012-12-21 | £135,000 | £195,237 +45% | Ground Floor Shop and 8 Lower Ground Floor Prospect Hill Douglas IM1 1ES |
Matched by house name/street and parish against the Isle of Man Land Registry's transaction register — not a unique-ID lookup, so a shared house name could span more than one property. The "2026 prices" column carries each price forward at the island-wide repeat-sales index — it is what that sum of money would be at today's market level, not a valuation of this property, and it takes no account of the condition it was in then or any work done since.
All 97 recorded sales on Bucks Road
Planning history
| Application | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 16/00496/C | Change of use from retail to food preparation and takeaway | Permitted Look up 16/00496/C on the official register |
| 14/00496/B | Alteration to existing shop front to create an access door | Permitted Look up 14/00496/B on the official register |
Matched by house name/street and parish against Isle of Man planning applications decided between 4 Jan 2011 and 29 Dec 2023 (the government published no 2017 files, so that year is absent) — coverage is partial and not a unique-ID lookup. No bare decision date is available in this data, so the application number (which embeds its year) is shown instead. Where a "Worked on by" name appears, it's a known architect or surveyor cross-referenced by the same application number — worth a call before commissioning a fresh survey.
Search the official register for anything since 2023
Estimated cost of live planning permissions
Isle of Man planning permissions lapse 3 years after grant if unbuilt; these applications fall inside that window and were not refused, so they are presumptively still capable of being implemented.
- 16/00496/C — Internal alteration / change of use
£17,700–£47,200Change of use from retail to food preparation and takeaway - 14/00496/B — Internal alteration / change of use
£17,700–£47,200Alteration to existing shop front to create an access door
The work type shown is inferred automatically from the wording of the planning application's own description — it isn't stated by the applicant. The base cost range comes from published UK national renovation/build-cost guides for that type of project, with an 18% uplift for the Isle of Man. That uplift is not a guess: AtkinsRealis's July 2026 interim report for the Isle of Man Treasury puts Manx construction costs 18% above the UK average — joint 16th most expensive place to build on the BCIS rankings, comparable with Outer London — driven by imported materials with no local competition and a shortage of skilled trades. Figures exclude VAT at 20% and professional fees, typically 12–18%. These figures are indicative only, not a quote: actual cost depends on specification, finish, ground conditions and the contractor. For anything serious, get a quote from a local quantity surveyor or builder.
Latest to rent
