February house prices continue low growth trend
Average annual house price growth across Scotland remained subdued at 1% in the year to February 2023, the same as in January, according to the latest figures from the UK House Price Index related by Registers of Scotland.
The provisional average figure for the month of £180,287 was also 2.6% down on the January average on a non-seasonally adjusted basis. On a seasonally adjusted basis the decrease was equal to 0.3%.
Over the year, detached, semi-detached and terraced properties showed average price growth of between 1 and 2%, but flats saw a 0.5% dip in the average price.
Across the UK, the average price of £287,506 was up 5.5% on February 2022 and down by 1.0% between January 2023 and February 2023 (0.3% on a seasonally adjusted basis).
Average prices for local authority areas in Scotland, which are based on a three month moving average to help remove some of the volatility, showed year-on-year increases in 27 out of 32 local authority areas. The largest mainland increase was in Moray (10.1%), followed by Stirling (9.0%) and West Dunbartonshire (8.6%). The largest decrease was recorded in City of Aberdeen (6.6%), followed by Inverclyde (3.2%) and South Ayrshire (2.9%).
The new figures also show the provisional volume of residential sales in Scotland in December 2022 as 7,735, down 12.2% on the original provisional estimate for December 2021.
Kenny Crawford, Registers of Scotland business development director, commented: "Scotland's annual house price inflation has generally been slowing since the recent peak of 13.8% in the 12 months to April 2022, and has shown slower growth than the average for the UK since July 2022.
"The volume of transactions for calendar year 2022 was very similar to the pre-pandemic period in 2019."