Housing market worth £160 billion

The housing market was worth more than £160 billion to Scotland in the past ten years, figures have shown.

A Registers of Scotland report showed that the total value of the residential sales market from 2007-08 to 201718 was £161.3bn.

Kenny Crawford, business development and information director at Registers of Scotland, said: “The Scottish property market is a signifi- cant component of the Scottish economy. In 2017-18, the total value of residential sales alone was £17.9bn, an increase of 7.8 per cent when compared with 2016-17.

“We’ve also seen an increase in average house prices, up 13.2 per cent when comparing 2017-18 with 2007-08. Overall, house prices remained relatively stable until 2012-13, but have been generally increasing since then.”

The proportion of residential sales registered with a mortgage fell from 84.5 per cent in 2007-08 to 68.3 per cent in 2016-17.

New-build property sales accounted for 11.7 per cent of the all-scotland sales in 201718, with a total of 11,969 sales.

Mr Crawford added: “The volume of residential sales in 2017-18, at 102,430, remains substantially lower than the 149,145 sales recorded in the pre-financial crisis period in 2007-08. However, volumes in 2017-18 were the highest since 2007-08 and have been increasing year on year from the low of 70,507 in 2011-12.”