The Scottish Property Market in 2019

The 2018-19 Property Market Report for Scotland was published last month (11^th June 2019) by Registers of Scotland, highlighting that the Scottish property market is reaching an 11-year-high.

The Property Market Report has been detailing the major trends in Scottish land and property market since 2003-04. The report provides residential and non-residential markets as well as key figures on house prices and sale transactions.

The 2018-19 report’s three key findings include:

• The average price of a residential property in Scotland is £178,991
• The volume of residential property sales in Scotland is 101,628
• The value of residential property sales in Scotland is £18.2 billion

Touching on the report’s first key finding, the average price of a residential property in Scotland is up by 2.2 per cent from 2017-18 and up by 16 per cent in contrast to the pre-financial crash average price of £154,817 in 2007-08. Overall, the average residential property price in Scotland has increased by 77 per cent since the start of the Registers of Scotland house price data in 2003/04.

Moreover, the volume of residential property sales in Scotland has increased by 44 per cent to 101,628 sales compared to the recent low of 70,505 sales in 2011-12. However, this is a decrease of 32 per cent since 2006-07, peak year, when there were 150,455 sales.

The final key finding regards the value of residential property sales in Scotland. It highlights that the

market value has been increasing every year since 2011-12. The recorded value of residential property sales in 2018-19 was £18.2 billion, an increase of 1.6 per cent since the previous financial year (2017-18). This remains 21 per cent below the pre-financial crisis level in 2007-08 (£23.1 billion).

The report also looks at the non-residential market, covering commercial sales, commercial leases, and sales of titles that are classified as forestry, agriculture and land. The overall market value of all types of non-residential sales in 2018-19 was £4.0 billion. Commercial sales accounted for 81 per cent with the remainder from sales of forestry, agriculture and land.