The latest publication[1] of the UK House Price Index (UK HPI) shows that the average price[2] of a property in Scotland in October 2016 was £143,131 – an increase of 4.0 per cent on the previous year and an increase of 1.0 per cent when compared to the previous month. This compares to a UK average of £216,674, which was an increase of 6.9 per cent over the year and an increase of 0.1 per cent when compared to the previous month.

Registers of Scotland director of commercial services Kenny Crawford said: “The average price of a residential property in Scotland continues to show steady growth, with month-on-month increases in every month this year apart from February and August. This is a significant change from last year when there were decreases month-on-month in six out of the 12 months.

“Average prices have been steadily increasing on a year-on-year basis, too, with only one drop in average price being recorded in the past three years. This was in March of this year.

“The volume of residential sales in Scotland in August 2016[3] was 8,468 – a decrease of 2.8 per cent on the previous year and down 7.0 per cent on last month. This compares with annual decreases in sales volumes of 20.3 per cent in England, 11.6 per cent in Wales and 10.7 per cent in Northern Ireland.”

The top five local authorities in terms of sales volumes were Glasgow City (1,031 sales – this is only the third time in the past 12 months that Glasgow City has overtaken the City of Edinburgh as the top local authority in terms of volumes), City of Edinburgh (1,020 sales), Fife (564 sales), South Lanarkshire (520 sales) and North Lanarkshire (415 sales).

The biggest price increase over the last year was in East Renfrewshire where the average price increased by 17.7 per cent to £222,523[4]. The biggest decrease was again in the City of Aberdeen, where prices fell by 8.7 per cent to £172,870.

Across Scotland, all property types showed an increase in average price when compared with the previous year, with detached properties showing the biggest increase of 7.1 per cent to £251,709.

The average price for a property purchased by a former owner occupier was £172,444 – an increase of 5.2 per cent on the previous year. The average price for property purchased by a first time buyer was £114,992 – an increase of 2.6 per cent on the previous year

The average price for a cash sale was £131,584 – an increase of 3.5 per cent on the previous year – while the average price for property purchased with a mortgage was £148,481 – an increase of 4.2 per cent on the previous year.

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[1] This publication covers statistics up to October 2016.

[2] Note that all average prices reported from the UK HPI are geometric means, which will typically be closer to the median than the arithmetic mean. Also note that average price estimates for the most recent months are provisional figures and are likely to change when more recent data is incorporated into the index. Revision policies can be accessed here.

[3] Due to a period of 2 to 8 weeks between completion and registration of sales, volume figures based on the month of date of entry are presented up to August because September and October figures may change when more recent sales applications data is received.

[4] Local authority areas where sales volumes represent less than 1 per cent of the all Scotland sales volume are excluded from the figures used for highlighting purposes due to the volatility of the market in these areas. While East Renfrewshire exceeded the 1 per cent, there were only 183 sales in this Local Authority area. The increase in average price could therefore have been influenced by a number of sales at the higher end of the market.