House prices in Scotland rose by a record amount during the past year with the value of an average property increasing by more than 14 per cent.
New figures from the UK House Price Index show that the average price of a property in Scotland in July 2021 was £177,166, an increase of 14.6% on July 2020.
Comparing with the previous month, house prices in Scotland rose by 2.0 per cent between June 2021 and July 2021.
The UK average house price was £255,535, which was an increase of 8.0 per cent on July 2020 and a decrease of 3.7 per cent on the previous month.
READ MORE: The Scots house price boom hotspots fuelled by a Covid craving of open spaces
The rise in house prices was not unifom across the country, with some local authority areas outstripping others.
The largest increase on the mainland was in Inverclyde, where the average price increased by 29.0 per cent to £119,168. The smallest increase was recorded in Stirling, where the average price increased by 4.9 per cent to £218,602
The most expensive average property was found in the city of Edinburhg, where prices rose to £309,227. The least expensive council area to buy property was East Ayrshire, where the average price of a home was £109,985.
A total of 8,379 properties were sold in May this year, an increase of 171.6 per cent on the original provisional estimate for May 2020.
This compares with increases of 2.3 per cent in England, 13.7 per cent in Wales, and 41.8 per cent in Northern Ireland (Quarter 1 – 2021 compared with the same quarter in the previous year).
The volume of sales in May 2020 was the lowest number of residential sales transactions recorded in the month of May in this time series.
READ MORE: Which local authority has the highest and lowest valued properties?
This is due to the introduction of measures to reduce the spread of the coronavirus (from mid-March 2020 onwards, in which non-essential construction activity stopped, and home buyers were advised to delay moving to a new home where possible, until the lockdown restrictions began to ease towards the end of July 2020.
The pandemic caused a dip in house sales
Registers of Scotland Business Development Director Kenny Crawford said: “Property prices continued their trend upwards in July. The average price of a property in Scotland of £177,166 is the highest reported for any month since January 2004, from when Scottish data for the UK HPI was first available.
“Over the year as a whole from June 2020 to the end of May 2021, the number of transactions has picked up following the reductions caused by COVID-19 measures and cumulatively is now 17 per cent higher than the previous year.”
In Scotland, Semi-detached properties showed the largest increase in average house price, rising by 16.3 per cent in the year to July 2021 to £187,181, although this figure may have been affected by the lower than usual numbers of transactions recorded in July 2020.
Flatted properties showed the smallest increase, rising by 12.5 per cent in the year to July 2021 to £124,517.
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