Private Sector Rent Statistics, Scotland, 2010 to 2024

Source data – general approach

This publication uses data from the Rent Service Scotland 'Market Evidence Database', which is a database used to meet the needs of determining annual Local Housing Allowance levels.

The market evidence data on private rents is sourced through a variety of means, including advertised rental information, private landlord and letting agent returns, and mailshot initiatives.

The database excludes any rents related to social housing, mid-market rents, halls of residence, and private tenancies known to be the subject of housing benefit and regulated tenancies.

Extracts of the database are available back to 2010 – the publication presents comparisons of recent rents against the earliest available data.

In the latest year to end September 2024, an estimated 80% of Rent Service Scotland Market Evidence records were based on advertised rents, with the remainder being based on transactional data received from letting agents or landlords. Note that it is likely that a proportion of the transactional data received will also relate to recently advertised rents, where the records received relate to tenancies which have only been recently advertised or let.

The data collected includes a minimum level of address, property attributes and tenancy details. Rents relating to studio/bedsit properties, properties with 5 or more bedrooms, and bed and breakfast lodgings have been excluded from this publication due to small sample sizes. Rents for bedrooms in shared properties are presented as 'rent only' figures, i.e. do not include the additional cost of shared services where these are known.

If a particular property has more than one piece of market evidence available in a given year, then only the most recent item of evidence for that year has been used in the average rent calculations for this publication.

There is currently no legal obligation for landlords or agents to provide Government, or any other organisations, with details of the rents achieved on their lettings. Therefore rent officers have to actively seek, collect, validate and maintain a suitable dataset.

There is no requirement for rent officers to collect 100% of rents that are agreed between landlord and tenant.

Rent Officers instead aim to capture a sample of around 10% of private rents based on the total number of records obtained (the amount of records used in average rent calculations may be slightly less than this due to removal of any multiple records for a single property/address in a given year). Landlord registration data and census data is used as a baseline for establishing and monitoring the total sample proportion that is aimed to be achieved.

As rent officers do not have access to every letting that takes place in the market the use of a random sample is not feasible, and given the variations in the size of the markets in each Broad Rental Market Area a simple quota based sample would be unlikely to produce representative results either. The sample should ideally reflect the profile of the market in terms of the type of property, its distribution, and the letting sources within each Broad Rental Market Area.

There are no definitive measures for these so rent officers monitor local market activity and acquire feedback from landlords, agents and tenants. This market intelligence means that rent officers are able to continually evaluate the composition of the list of rents used for Local Housing Allowance, and where necessary divert resources from their regular program of data collection to address any perceived weakness in the data.

This combined approach of regular and targeted collection based on market intelligence aims to produce a sample which reflects rents for each property size and for each Broad Rental Market Area. This approach in turn reflects the structure of the legislation which allows for rent officer judgment on a number of these factors.

The private rented sector is very complex and is continually changing as it reacts to market forces. The overall target of a 10% sample therefore only represents a guide figure at Broad Rental Market Area level. Local knowledge, confidence testing and interpretation of other available data may be applied to refine the guide level. This contributes towards achieving a sample which reflects rents for each property size category at a Broad Rental Market Area level.

It is important to note that the data collected on individual rents may encompass different property types and addresses for each data collection year. A supplementary Excel Workbook, “BRMA Detailed Profiles Tool”, has been published alongside this written report. This workbook provides the sample sizes for each Broad Rental Market Area. The data has also been published in an open data format comma-separated values file called “Private Rents Open Data”. It can be seen that there have been some variations in the number of records by rental areas over time, and also the proportions by size of property. Some of this may be due to changes in the underlying rental stock over time, and some may be due to sampling variations over time.

Also note that some methodological improvements were made to the 2020 publication, which have been carried forward again to this publication, in relation to how Scotland level average rent figures have been estimated. These include the use of a weighted stock approach, which is set in further detail below.

Sample sizes

The rental values in this publication are based on data collected on around 25,000 to 40,000 individual rents each year, representing about 8% to 12% of all private rented dwellings

Ther Supporting Documents Excel Workbook “Publication Tables and Publication Charts” provide information on sample sizes data by Broad Rental Market Area.

The proportion of properties by number of bedrooms varies by Broad Rental Market Area. For example in Scottish Borders, 1 bedroom properties in the year to end September 2024 made up 17% of sample records and 2 bedroom properties made up 39% of the total. Comparatively in West Lothian, 12% of records were 1 bedroom properties and 50% of records were 2 bedroom properties.  This shows it is generally not appropriate to compare an overall "average" rent figure (averaged across all property sizes) between different areas of the country.

It is also important to note that there are some sample data profiles that have changed over time by property size, which may also introduce some bias into comparing overall Broad Rental Market Area averages over time.  Table 9 - 9 - Sample Prop of BRMA Totals in the Supporting Excel Tables provides time series of how the proportion of a BRMA’s total records has varied between 2010 and 2024 by number of bedrooms.  As can be observed the proportion can fluctuate over time.  For example in 2010, 1 bedroom properties reflected 34% of sample records for Aberdeen and Shire whilst in 2024 1 bedroom properties were 28% of sample records. 

Table 10 - Sample Proportions by BRMA in the Supporting Documents Excel Tables and Charts Workbook show the proportions of the total samples that are within each Broad Rental Market Area each year, by property size. For most property sizes each rental area has a relatively consistent proportion each year, however there have been some changes over time. For example in the 2024, the proportion of all 2 bedroom records that are located in Lothian decreased by 4 percentage points compared to the previous year.

Distribution of Sample by Month

To accurately represent rent paid throughout the year to end September 2024, ideally sample records would be evenly collected by month and by area to reflect rents throughout the year.  The practicalities of operational record collection by Rent Service Scotland and when properties are advertised to the market mean this may not occur.  This can be due to, for example, when properties are advertised to the market in different geographies, seasonal trends and scarcity of properties within geographies, Rent Service Scotland staff availability and other operational pressures faced by Rent Service Scotland, such as duties relating to rent adjudication.

Table 12 - Proportion of Sample Collected by Month in the Supporting Documents Excel Tables and Charts Workbook shows the proportion of records collected by bedroom number and by month.  As can be observed, for some BRMAs are skewed in the date of record collection.  For example 65% of records collected for 1 bedroom properties Dumfries and Galloway were collected in October 2023.  If rents grow throughout the year, this skew towards the start of the year could result in the level of estimated rent presented in this publication being lower than what renters actually experienced.  For Scotland as a whole across all properties by number of bedrooms, record collection was generally balanced throughout the year, though more records were generally collected in October 2023, May 2024, July 2024 and September 2024.  Less records were generally collected in December 2023 and June 2024. 

Use of weights to estimate Scotland level averages

This publication uses statistical weights by area and number of bedrooms to estimate Scotland level average rents by number of bedrooms.  This is done to help ensure the national average figures presented reflect any changes to the underlying composition of private rental properties over time and to minimise any effects of changes to sample numbers achieved for particular property sizes or areas in any given years. As can be seen Table 9 - Sample Proportions by BRMA in the Supporting Excel Tables there is variation year-on-year in the proportion of records collected by rental area and number of bedrooms. 

The weights have been calculated using the results of the Scottish Household Survey (SHS). The full weights are published in 11 - Derived Sample Weights in the Supporting Documents Excel Workbook “Publication Tables and Charts”.  The Scottish Household Survey (SHS) weights have been built up by using an approximate mapping of local authority areas to Broad Rental Market Areas.

For each property size category, the stock based weights have been calculated based on the proportion of private rented households in each category that are located in each of the Broad Rental Market Areas.

The exception is for 1 bedroom shared properties, where the weightings are instead based on the estimated proportions of owner occupier or private rented households in each areas that contain two or more adults who are not related or who are not in a married / civil partnership or a co-habiting partnership, with the aim to identify households where there may be an individual room being rented in some form.

To note one limitation of the weighting approach applied is that there may be some level of mis-match between the SHS weights (covering all PRS stock) and the sample of records collected from Rent Service Scotland (i.e. excluding those with housing benefit and regulated tenancies).

The weights from the survey data have been constructed using 3 year rolling data periods to help with precision of results at Broad Rental Market Area and to smooth out annual variations seen in the survey results. Each 3 year data period being centred on the rental year to be estimated with a lag applied of 2 years, due to the time delay between 3 year survey results being available and the latest rental year in question. For example in the 2020 publication, for the rental year 2020, a 3 year data period 2017 to 2019 was used to construct the stock based weights, which equates to the year 2020 lagged by two years (i.e. to be centred on 2018).

The collection of data for and results of the Scottish Household Survey were impacted by Covid-19. This meant data in 2020 and 2021 was non-comparable to previous years. The 2021, 2022 and 2023 versions of this publication used the same weights as the 2020 publication – that is the 3 year period of 2017 to 2019. For this publication, weights have been derived using SHS data from 2018, 2019 and 2022.

A small error in the estimation of weights used for 1 bed shared properties in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 was discovered during the development of this publication.  This resulted in derived rents which were 23p to 72p lower than originally published.  The correct revised figures can be found in the publication supplementary tables and charts and in the open data csv file. 

In years 2018, 2019 and 2022, there were no 4 bedroom East Dunbartonshire properties in the SHS collection. To account for this, the 2017 to 2019 average value was inputted and the overall weightings re-estimated to ensure weightings still aggregated to 100