Scotland’s housing market: Why property experts are upbeat for 2025
Legal firm Lindsays is forecasting more than £200 million worth of home sales in 2025 as market conditions stabilise and interest rates continue to fall.
Property experts at the Edinburgh-headquartered firm say a more stable market during the past year has been to the benefit of buyers and sellers following years of extreme highs and lows in both prices and trading conditions. Lindsays, which also has offices in Crieff, Dundee, Glasgow and Perth, sold homes valued at a total of £194.8m during 2024 - a 14 per cent rise on 2023 - and is predicting that they will break through the £200m barrier in 2025.
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Hide AdMaurice Allan, managing director of the firm’s residential property team, said: “The signs are pointing to steady growth in the market over the course of 2025. There will be a good volume of properties on the market. As a firm, we certainly expect to sell in excess of £200m-worth of homes during this year.”


Of the properties sold by Lindsays during 2024, more than £115m-worth of them were through the firm’s Edinburgh team, £69.4 were in Dundee and £10.1m in Perth. It noted that the past year had been the first since before the pandemic where there was a full 12 months without extremes - whether that was the peak in prices seen following lockdown or the lows that followed the spike in interest rates after the Liz Truss-Kwasi Kwarteng mini-Budget of 2022.
“We are now operating in a more predictable, tradable market - which is better for having those real highs and lows removed from it,” Allan added. “You can far better predict where offers should be pitched. A settled market is a good market. That has allowed more and more people to move back to the traditional pattern of selling their current home before placing offers to buy their next one, which is putting them in a far stronger position as bidders.”
Andrew Diamond, partner and head of residential property at Lindsays, said: “The outlook for the market is probably as settled as we have seen it for a number of years. We could be looking at a situation where, by this time next year, the base rate of interest is 1 per cent lower than it is now. Lending is already fairly sensibly priced, but this will make things even more attractive to borrowers.”
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Hide AdWhile the Bank of England held interest rates at 4.75 per cent in December, economists are expecting at least two or three quarter-point cuts in the base rate over the course of this year.
The house price index for Scotland showed that the average price of a property in October 2024 was £197,000, an increase of 5.5 per cent compared to October 2023. The City of Edinburgh was the highest-priced local authority region in which to buy a property, with an average price of £340,000. The lowest-priced areas were Inverclyde and East Ayrshire, where average prices of £133,000 were recorded.
UK house prices increased by an average of 4.7 per cent annually in December, according to the Nationwide Building Society.
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