Aberdeen Shows The Way

[Key Stakeholder]

Oil industry helps shore up cost of homes.

ABERDEEN is continuing to show the way when it comes to house prices.

New figures show Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire have the highest average house prices in the country.

According to the Scottish House Price Monitor from Lloyds TSB Scotland, the average cost of a home in the Granite City is £210,877.

And the figure for the North which includes Aberdeenshire, is £187,815.

Edinburgh is third on the list with homes costing an average of £179,912

Scotland's national average house price is £155,805.

John MacRae, chairman of Aberdeen Solicitor's Property Centre, said: "We are very fortunate with our economy.

"It is the oil industry that makes the difference, it is as simple as that.

"We are not roaring ahead while everyone else is plummeting

"We are maintaining our position"

The figures, which are for the year until October 2011, show a 2.7% rise in the price of property in Aberdeen and a 0.1% in the North sector.

Mr MacRae said: "The average price is probably down slightly on earlier in the year, but it does dip in the winter."

"The most encouraging news for those in the industry is the steady level of sales.

"The level of activity has recovered quite well," said Mr MacRae.

"We are not as busy as before the slump but we are back to a normal level.

"There were around 1,400 sales in the second quarter and a similar amount in the third. I am reasonably confident we will continue to do well in the spring."

Across Scotland the number of house purchases was down by 9% in the first nine months of 2011 compared with the previous year.

Donald MacRae, chief economist with Lloyds TSB Scotland, said: "The Scottish housing market has adjusted to the recession with a halving of sales and a period of volatile price movement.

"A faster recovery awaits a resurgence of both business and consumer confidence."

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[MrWallace]

I live in Aberdeen. The reason house prices are still rising in Aberdeen is because there is still low levels of unemployment here and the recession isn't effecting us as much as the rest of the country.

This is purely because the price of oil is high and Aberdeen's economy has been built round the oil industry.

I remember in 1999 the UK's economy was booming and in Aberdeen people were being paid off by the hundreds as the price of oil hit $10 a barrel and the operators stopped drilling new wells.

We're on a boom bust economic cycle just like the rest of the country, it's just that our cycle is a different one.

Places like Qatar and Kuwait are booming too now.

[Key Stakeholder]

Aberdeen is "showing the way", with this "encouraging news".

[tomwatkins]

I live in Aberdeen. The reason house prices are still rising in Aberdeen is because there is still low levels of unemployment here and the recession isn't effecting us as much as the rest of the country.

This is purely because the price of oil is high and Aberdeen's economy has been built round the oil industry.

I remember in 1999 the UK's economy was booming and in Aberdeen people were being paid off by the hundreds as the price of oil hit $10 a barrel and the operators stopped drilling new wells.

We're on a boom bust economic cycle just like the rest of the country, it's just that our cycle is a different one.

Places like Qatar and Kuwait are booming too now.

Funny enough I drove through Aberdeen last week and couldn't help noticing how clean the city was. Obviously the local roadsweepers/cleaners are still gainfully employed? reeked of a city still doing well IMO.

[cashinmattress]

The very top end of the Aberdeen/Shire property market is doing well, but you can say the say for all nice neighbourhoods with the nice schools, almost anywhere in the UK.

Mid market, if in a good neighbourhood, is only just drifting along at 2007 peak prices, give or take a few percent points.

Bottom end is what it is, somewhere dodgy to live with neds and anti-social crime a plenty, growing cheaper and more unattractive by the day.

Punters who enjoyed the property boom circa a decade ago, right up to the bust, were very lucky indeed.

Unless there are some significant finds in the North Sea and 100's of new wells spitting out 10,000+ BOE a day, we're never going back to those prices.

All this chain hotel, restaurant, and retail speculation is masking an old city in dire need of TLC and council spending for the public good.

Who let Hamish back in here?

[Diver Dan]

my italics

There is more than one story going on in Aberdeen. I see a lot of empty shops in most parts of the city; hair and beauty salons especially, seem to be going under in a lot of areas and there are plenty of cars with home-made 'For Sale' signs at the side of main roads.

Other people seem to be doing very well for themselves, thank-you very much.

[Torryloonmadegood]

Its a city of two halfs, those "lucky" enough to have the training/experience or willing to sacrifice to work overseas/offshore to gain oil salaries then the other 75% of the population struggling on national wages in an expensive city.

You can't blame their resentment however the sense of entitlement is overwhelming from some highly amusing posters.

There are plenty of jobs available if you have the skills. Working is having to be farmed out to London etc at the moment to fill the skills shortage in Aberdeen. The huge numbers of foreign professionals indicates a lack of home grown talent ......perhaps working offshore or a gaining a suitable technical degree are just too hard for the "unlucky" ?

[Torryloonmadegood]

I'd actually suggest that even at the bottom end there is reasonable support...obviously not for ex-council etc but for cheap flats in Torry etc which offer a fairly attractive rental yield.

I've looked at a few recently and they went to close pretty quickly. Still waiting to see what they sold for but my guess is there were around the home valuation values.

[Key Stakeholder]

Yes, that high oil price is the answer! As those nasty crunch-time graph markers ski-jump menacingly upwards - ever up - measuring species extinctions and habitat destruction; social inequality and political instability; resource depletion, global heat budget, ocean acidification and carbon emissions; business uncertainty, food price inflation and a deepening economic depression - the encouraging news is that one of the mechanisms which is critically bound up in all that contributes to all that delivers affluence for a handful of Audi A8 drivers in Aberdeen. You can tell they're affluent cos of the Audis A8's they drive to an industrial estate to do the 65-hour weeks they work, thank-you very much. Some people say that industrial estates are soulless battery-sheds for cubicle clones, but in fact they are dynamic, vibrant innovation hubs - thank-you very much!

Yes, somehow its also great that this mechanism delivers bubble-level house prices for a few in Aberdeen, for to the dynamic people who work in the oil industry, high oil house prices serve mostly to demonstrate to others and to confirm to themselves just how vibrant, dynamic and splendid they are; it's no more than they deserve! Thank-you very much!

Some people say that this high oil price is acting as a disincentive to the re-deployment of capital away from oil exploration and production and into the development of sustainable carbon-free energy sources, like deepwater wind and subsea tidal race turbines or CCS for coal fired electricity generation; that the oh-so-certain return on investment afforded by the high oil price militates against the reallocation of that capital into 'alternative' energy. But, in any case, why would anyone risk their capital on unproven technology which is supposed to fix a problem which isn't a problem anyway? Haven't they heard? Global warming is now recognised as a good thing. FACT. And Aberdeen shows the way, thank-you very much!

And - don't forget! - it's clear that this high oil price and 70 hour working weeks is the reward which the oil people of Aberdeen deserve, for is is the inevitable result of their own vibrant life choices - That dynamically red-faced 55-year old splendidly doing very well thank-you very much bellying out of his M-class in the car-park of some peripheral yet vibrant industrial-estate oil-shed innovation hub at 6 am made that high oil price happen! Somehow, his influence clearly reaches across the globe and influences global flows of capital, population trends and the capacities of millennia-aged geological strata. Obviously, anyone who doesn't love and praise vibrant Aberdeen (along with the splendid oil-people who make the town what it is today) are bitter resentful socialist layabout renters with a sense fo entitlement who missed the boat. But yes, it's their own fault for being born more recently than those baby-boomers who grabbed the lot while the grabbing was good. Thank-you very much!

Either that, or they are highly amusing wordies and book-poofs, like this guy:

Christopher Brookmyre - 'A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away'

Europe's Oil Capital. Honestly. The first time he heard the expression, he'd assumed it was a bit of self deprecatory humour. That was before he learned that there was no such thing as self-deprecatory humour in Aberdeen, particularly when it came to the town's utterly unfounded conceit of itself. It was a provincial fishing port that had struck it astronomically lucky with the discovery of North Sea oil, and the result was comparable to a country bumkin who had won the lottery, minus the dopey grin and colossal sense of incredulous gratitude. The prevalent local delusion wasn't that the town had merely been in the right place at the right time, but that it had somehow done something to deserve this massive good fortune, and not before time either.

I guess some young 'pseudo intellectual' people don't like the idea of doing a 'technical' diploma or working offshore in order to help destroy the atmosphere for money. Can't think why...

[Torryloonmadegood]

priceless, absolutely clueless, had to send it to the red faced A8 and M5 drivers I know.........

Never had an A8, wife had a Q8 but went back to her usual Cayenne after a couple of months, you know women, the interior mirror has to be in just the right place.

Its two minutes walk to work in the West End so keep the meno-motor for the weekend and client meetings. Even with the limited mileage, I think its important earning my living from it to consume as much as possible, you know support the industry and all that, I guess you "go large" when ever you've a couple of quid spare to do your bit in a similar vein ?

With all that resentment is day-to-day as difficult as I imagine it must be ?

[wurdoomed]

bitter resentful socialist layabout renters with a sense of entitlement who missed the boat.

K.S.

That is about the most entertaining and insightful rant I have read about Aberdeen since Theroux visited in the 80s. Seriously thought-provoking, and you've coined a new acronym BRSLRWSEWMBs.

Respect