Scottish Housing Market Review: Q1 2025

4. Private Rental Sector

4.1. Private Housing Rental Prices

Letting agencies only cover around half of the private rented sector, and each letting agent's data will be affected by its market coverage, which will vary by geography and market segment. Subject to these caveats, there are signs that, following the sharp fall in inflation, as well as a smaller fall in interest rates (see Chart 6.1 and Chart 6.2), growth in new-let rents has fallen significantly (Chart 4.1). Citylets data shows that annual growth in new-let rents covered by their dataset has fallen from a peak of 13.7% in Q3 2023 to 6.2% in Q4 2024. Rightmove data shows a similar trend, with a fall from 14.5% in Q3 2023 to 4.7% in Q4 2024. Slightly more recent Zoopla data for January 2025 estimates rental growth in Scotland at 3.1%, down from 5.8% in October 2024.

Since these statistics are based on new-let rents, they have not been directly affected by the Cost of Living (Tenants Protection) (Scotland) Act 2022 rent cap restrictions from September 2022 to March 2024, or the temporary modification to the rent adjudication process which applied from April 2024 to March 2025, both of which applied to existing tenants only.

Source: Scottish Government