Scotland’s property market resilient as London falters

Scotland’s property market is performing better than London’s according to the latest figures from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

Recent RICS surveys on housing, construction and commercial property markets show London has suffered a marked deterioration in confidence while Scotland is generally continuing to thrive.

Chartered surveyors are overwhelmingly seeing price declines in the housing market in London whereas in Scotland, more of them are still reporting higher house prices. Over the last three months, just 19% of chartered surveyors in Scotland reported a fall in house prices whereas in London 54% saw prices go down.

The latest construction survey showed workloads in Scotland were continuing to grow strongly. In London the amount of work has decelerated for four successive quarters.

Chartered surveyors in Scotland have reported much higher demand for commercial property than in London resulting in higher rental growth north of the border.

Graeme Hartley, Director of RICS Scotland said: “Scotland has been bucking the UK trend of falling house prices in much of 2007 and now it is outperforming London in construction and commercial property too. While the London economy has been in pretty good shape until recently, it was still lagging the performance of Scotland in 2007.

“There is great uncertainty surrounding the global economy but the figures from the RICS surveys offer Scotland some positive news. Investors have confidence in Scotland, employment has climbed by 2.2% over the previous twelve months and these latest figures suggest the Scottish property sector is surviving the credit crunch.”