Scottish Housing Market Review Q1 2024

Quarterly bulletin collating a range of previously published statistics on the latest trends in the Scottish housing market.


1. Sales

1.1. Scottish Sales Performance: National

Chart 1.1. Number of residential property sales registered: Scotland (Quarterly data, to Q4 2023)

Source: Registers of Scotland

After a period of considerable volatility due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as measures such as the temporary reduction in Land and Buildings Transaction Tax, the volume of transactions has been trending down due to the impact of the cost-of-living crisis, in particular the increase in interest rates (see Section 6). Registers of Scotland statistics show that there were 25,106 residential property sales registered across Scotland in Q4 2023 – relative to Q4 2022 this was a decrease of 12.0% (3,413); compared to the pre-pandemic position in Q4 2019 this was a decrease of 13.4% (3,875). The annual change in transactions was negative for the ninth consecutive quarter in Q4 2023.

Chart 1.2, which uses Revenue Scotland data to plot the percentage difference between monthly residential LBTT returns over the period 2020 to 2024 relative to the corresponding month in 2019 (with 2019 chosen as the baseline to reflect pre-Covid market conditions), provides a more fine-grained picture of recent trends. While it can be seen that for much of 2022, transactions closely tracked their levels in 2019, the number of transactions since December 2022 has generally been significantly lower than before the pandemic. While this remains the case for the most recent 3-month period ending February 2024, with transactions down by 11.7% relative to the 3 month-period ending February 2020, immediately prior to the pandemic, transactions were only down by 2.3% compared to the 3 months ending February 2023, which may suggest that the rate at which transactions are falling is beginning to moderate.

Chart 1.2 Residential LBTT returns: Percentage difference between 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 and corresponding month in 2019 (Monthly data, to February 2024)

Source: Revenue Scotland

1.2. Scottish Sales Performance: Local Authorities

Table 1.1 sets out the level and annual change in quarterly transactions by local authority. The volume of transactions at local authority level can fluctuate significantly – particularly in smaller local authorities like Shetland Islands and Orkney Islands – and to remove some of this volatility, the change in transactions in the last 4 quarters compared to the preceding 4 quarters is also presented.

Table 1.1 shows that housing market activity has declined at both the national and local level throughout 2023. Only South Ayrshire had more sales in the year to Q4 2023 than the corresponding period a year earlier and this was modest growth at 0.1%. Aberdeenshire was the area that recorded the largest fall, with the number of transactions falling by 19.7%.

Table 1.1 Local Authority residential transactions
Sales - Q4 2023 Annual change – Q4 2023 Annual change – 4 quarters to Q4 2023
Aberdeen City 1,080 -9.5% -12.5%
Aberdeenshire 926 -20.4% -19.7%
Angus 477 -17.3% -15.6%
Argyll and Bute 461 -15.1% -10.5%
Clackmannanshire 219 -14.8% -9.1%
Dumfries and Galloway 607 -5.6% -8.1%
Dundee City 628 -17.9% -16.2%
East Ayrshire 582 -7.0% -8.9%
East Dunbartonshire 433 -12.9% -4.6%
East Lothian 618 -8.4% -2.1%
East Renfrewshire 465 -9.0% -7.6%
Edinburgh, City of 2,629 -10.3% -11.8%
Falkirk 680 -15.6% -6.2%
Fife 1,667 -9.2% -4.8%
Glasgow City 2,847 -14.8% -10.9%
Highland 1,103 -14.8% -13.8%
Inverclyde 350 4.2% -9.2%
Midlothian 474 -10.4% -9.6%
Moray 477 -13.1% -6.9%
Na h-Eileanan Siar 94 3.3% -10.4%
North Ayrshire 677 -0.3% -1.6%
North Lanarkshire 1,403 -11.4% -8.6%
Orkney Islands 94 2.2% 7.6%
Perth and Kinross 773 -15.2% -9.8%
Renfrewshire 939 -14.2% -8.1%
Scottish Borders 497 -12.5% -14.9%
Shetland Islands 56 -29.1% -16.7%
South Ayrshire 661 0.2% 0.1%
South Lanarkshire 1,664 -14.7% -9.4%
Stirling 422 -18.5% -6.7%
West Dunbartonshire 348 4.2% -2.8%
West Lothian 755 -14.2% -8.3%
Scotland 25,106 -12.0% -9.7%

Source: Registers of Scotland

Contact

Email: jake.forsyth@gov.scot

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