A shortage of homes to buy and rent because of a sales surge and fewer landlords has pushed prices to pre-crash levels in the West End of Glasgow.
Across the country a lack of homes becoming available for sale in Scotland is continuing to nudge house prices upwards, according to the latest Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Residential Market Survey.
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Scottish surveyors responding to the survey said that 21 per cent more surveyors said that prices rose in the past three months than those who said they fell, and that the West End had emerged as a pinch point, particularly with few new-build schemes within the much-loved district.
Grant Robertson, of Allied Surveyors in Glasgow, said: "It is driving prices to spike levels.
"The level of stock in the West End is at a historic low.
"Current sales numbers can’t be sustained without restocking.
"We had extremely high sales during the autumn period because of the low interest rates driving people coming out of the rental sector who decided it was time to stop renting and start buying and that stock just hasn’t been replaced."
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He went on: "An example of that is a West End tenement flat, a one-bedroom in Novar Drive we’re seeing sales reaching over £240,000, and that is 30 per cent ahead of the pre-crash prices and up around 15 per cent on the figures that we saw in 2017.
"The accidental landlords have disappeared from the market, those are the people who in 2008-9 couldn’t sell and were being relocated for their jobs.
"Now they are exiting we are seeing a reduction in the stock available to rent."
He said: "Right now the fear is if you are putting your house on the market you might be making yourself homeless because there is nowhere else to go and the short-term rental supply market has also restricted significantly.
"Now is a great time to sell, not such a great time to buy.
"The pinch point is the West End. Not so much in Edinburgh, not so much in Aberdeen, a little bit in Inverness but not so much as the West End."
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Gail Hunter, RICS Director in Scotland, said: “Surveyors remain positive about the prospects for the housing market in Scotland.
"However, they also point to a shortage of properties becoming available for sale, which will have a constraining effect on sales activity and potentially push up prices further.
"Anecdotally, surveyors continue to report that the changes to Land and Buildings Transaction Tax are having an ongoing negative impact on instructions to sell in the middle to the prime brackets of the market, and this is having detrimental trickle-down effect in other house price brackets.”
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