Feb

26

Compare the Housing Market. Com “Simples”

Filed Under Market News, Scottish Property News by DanCookson | Leave a Comment

As the end of the month draws near its easy to get lost among the myriad of press releases covering the UK housing market. While these can often give conflicting views on the state of the market there are a few very handy sources which distil this information objectively and succinctly. The Scottish Housing Market Review from the Scottish Government’s Centre for Housing Market Analysis (CHMA) is one of them. Hardly the snappiest or memorable of titles but its 4 page monthly snapshot of the latest statistics does a great job of summarising and presenting the latest housing market information. Well worth checking out.

The graph below is from CHMA (with my annotation) and shows how the Scottish Housing market peaked later and has recovered sooner.

One gap in the CHMA analysis is the Private Rented Sector (PRS) which is known among housing economists to be particularly difficult to track not least because in Scotland 75% of all Private Rented Properties are owned by individuals, couples or families (100,000 private landlords  own 130,000 properties).  With such a fragmented market and no single source of data (such as Lenders, Land Register) producing reliable PRS statistics is difficult.  However, Citylets manages more than 50,000 property rentals per year which is a very rich source of data to analyse. Our Quarterly Rental Report http://www.citylets.co.uk/reports/ provides the most detailed analysis of the PRS in Scotland and will evolve  over the coming months – we hope you find it useful.