House price growth returns to Aberdeen

House prices in Aberdeen city and suburbs rose by 2.4 per cent in the latest quarter, according to new figures.

Aberdeen Solicitors’ Property Centre Limited, in cooperation with the University of Aberdeen, Business School, Centre for Real Estate Research, has published statistics for the second quarter of 2019 on the Aberdeen housing market.

The report also found that house prices were down 3.8 per cent over last year and that annualised house price change over five years was down 4.5 per cent.

John MacRae, chairman of the board of directors of ASPC said: “The report … demonstrates, for the first time in a very long time, that house prices in our area have shown a small upturn. This is very welcome news, but we require to exercise caution and await results in the remainder of the year, to assess how viable the apparent improvement is.

“The current level of prices in our area had decreased since a high point in 2014, so an increase in price, coupled with modest increases in volume, should be seen as an encouraging sign that we may be starting to recover. Over the last 12 months, while the local market has been a little unpredictable, we have seen modest increases in sales volume most months. An increase in price on top of that is the most encouraging our local market has been for some time.

“Apart from the headline-grabbing move on price, volume of sales is also important and, comparing year with year, the second quarter of 2019 has seen 2.1 per cent of a drop in volume compared with the second quarter of 2018. I regard this as not too significant given that there is interesting subtext in the detail. Sales volume of flats decreased by 2.7 per cent but sales of semi-detached houses increased by 7.2 per cent and sales volume of detached houses increased by 24.9 per cent.

“This is probably the first time in five years that I have been able to indicate that there is an upward movement in price, coupled with continuing modest improvement in volume of sales. The hope is that it will not disappear but will continue in a modest and sustainable way.”