My son and his wife live in a very nice flat in a very nice part of Edinburgh, just had a little boy and decided to look further out of town for a smallish house with a bit of garden, they found one, offers over £350k, they did their sums and decided they could offer £408k, only two bids, theirs and the winning bid of £460k--the house needed a lot of work-this is absolute maddness--but if a house finds a buyer at a price, that's the market.

Lucky for them that they missed out.

Unlucky for the "winning" bidder as they had to pay over £50k more than your son bid, in order to secure the property!

Madness in Scotland

I thought for one moment Gordon Brown had decided to return home.

house prices only ever go up in Scotland....

the crazy thing about this is scotland does not have the wealth of say england or other european countries which makes it even worse than the boom in england. remember more jobs in scotland reliant on browns handouts public sector etc etc.

Scotland will probably go through a more rapid bust than england for this reason, possibly following the Irish or more likely the Northern Ireland trend ie huge boom then a rapid catastrophic bursting....

My workmate is buying in Edinburgh city center. She's been hold that prices around the city are falling and expected to fall but the city center is likely to stay level or grow slightly due to the high level of demand of people wanting to move there ( even now there are houses with 30 plus offers at closing date).
No idea how true it is but she's made offers on a number of places and missed out narrowly despite good offers over.

I'd have though the public sector would be more robust than the private sector during hard times. You still need the police/firemen/nurses etc. Most of this is controlled via the Scottish parliament IIRC.

SORT BY:
NAME AV PRICE (£) QUARTER ANNUAL SALES
East Renfrewshire £217,017 7.4% 8.6% 616
Edinburgh, City Of £213,351 -5.8% 7.2% 4,824
East Lothian £210,684 0% 17.5% 826

What's 6% of 460K?

I would say so too - can't see what the fundamentals underpinning the market in Scotland are. Wages are just average, there is plenty of land to build on so there's no overcrowding issue as is the case in the S-E of England and the population in Scotland is falling and aging rapidly. And yet some parts of Edinburgh are as expensive to live in as New York now(!) e.g. £340k for a 2-bed flat. Apart from parents of Edinburgh Uni students and some "white flight" effect of middle-class families moving up from England, there is no real increased demand here. It's pure speculation and will end the same way it did in Ireland, the US, Spain etc.

Average earnings in the Highlands 16K average management earnings 24K average House price heading towards 200k.

Do the Maths

I'll rely on my sig tae sign off.

Definitely. If they'd offered 410 thousand they would have got the property for 40 grand less. This is the madness of the offers over system in Scotland.

Actually I read somewhere scotland is less likely to have a bust because of the high level of public sector/recession proof jobs.

Edinburgh council is way over budget and is getting rid of about 800 temporary and contract staff.

Just wait till the tories get a chance to rip into them in a year or so!

My brother has just sold his flat in sunny Glasgow for a rather hefty profit, seems the supply of greater fools is not completely exhausted. Despite my advice he is still fretting that he will lose out as prices only ever go up.......er.........right!

Take the money and run......

Scottish Enterprise is also winding down its local offices and centralising everything into large offices in the main towns and consolidating a lot of the small business support stuff with the Council. There will be job losses as a result - mainly voluntary redundancy of course as is typical with the public sector, but it's still a good chunk of jobs. This is all thanks to the efforts of the SNP who promised to cut down on public sector waste.

There was a transition period caused by devolution for the last few years where UK Scottish Office employees were overlapping with Scot Exec and Council but now devolution is more concrete, they'll be cutting out all the dross. So the public sector jobs aren't as secure as they seem...

I am 99% convinced the above is not true. Tell us the address of the house. No reason not to. It will be in the public domain anyway if this is true. All I hear is 'Edinburgh is picking up'. But i know lost of people trying to sell their house. Very few people have even had any viewings let alone offers.

A 'smallish' house with a garden just outside Edinburgh does not go for 460k. Unless of course it is smack bang in the middle of the new town or stockbridge.

So please tell us the details and we can check it on the ESPC. I can guarantee you for a fact the average house on the market in Edinburgh for around 400k is DESPERATE for buyers.

It does seem a bit implausible in the given the current climate, but nevertheless you cannot discount that there may well be blinkered numpties still out there who only read the Express.

If true, I bet the sellers could not believe their luck when the envelopes were opened.

Could have easily been a bungalow in Greenbank

I live just outside Edinburgh in a 3bed semi with a nice garden, it's a good area, the price would be below 250k...

You'd have to define 'Just outside Edinburgh' to quantify that statement. If you mean just outside the city centre, and still in Edinburgh's boundaries, thats fine.

If you mean 7 miles to the West or South of the city for example, and the word 'Edinburgh' does not appear in your postal address (some god awfull ex mining town does) then thats a whole other ball game entirely.

As the slowdown turns into a crash, it's those silly wee commuter places that have doubled their housing stock in the last 10 years that are going to get the living shite kicked out of them.

'Just outside Edinburgh' is a bit too vague, which is making everyone suspicious.

460k in Gullane - still just about plausible
460k in Tranent - ******.

Both are just outside Edinburgh...

not to mention the rows and rows of tenement g*sh and other s*ite "houses" that make up a large chunk of the actual city of Edinburgh.

Plausible, but not sensible. You might have Ronnie Corbett as a neighbour, but that doesn`t make it worth it.

Quite, but you clearly can't underestimate the stupidity of people who will want to pay over the odds to live in 'GI-llane'.

Liberton Drive

My goodness they got lucky missing out on that. Nice area and all but still. Someone will soon be realising theor 460k bid was a huge mistake !! Unless they are absolutely minted of course.