This week we publish our new Rural Land Market Data Report 2025.
This piece of research, provides the latest insights into the landscape of rural land ownership and value in Scotland. It is the latest in a series of annual publications, offering the most comprehensive overview of what’s happening in the Scottish rural land market.
Tracking non-residential land transactions based on Registers of Scotland (RoS) data, the report provides a valuable snapshot of the market in 2024. Some of what we saw this year includes:
- Large-scale sales remain rare. Only six sales over 1,000 hectares were recorded, continuing a five-year trend where the vast majority of transactions (94%) were for land parcels under 500 hectares.
- Forestry values decline. After a boom period, the average price for forestry land dropped to £10,054 per hectare, down from £15,327 in 2023.
- The average size of a farmland sale fell to a low of 81 hectares, yet the average price per hectare reached a five-year high of £16,502.
- The number of Estate sales was the lowest in the five-year period, with just 16 sales recorded.
To produce this unique analysis, we rely on official data on transfers of ownership purchased yearly from Registers of Scotland (RoS). This data provides the four key pieces of information needed to build a picture of how land is transacting: confirmation that a land transfer is a sale, the size of the area of land sold, the price of the sale, and its location.
However, when we look closely at the data, we uncover some significant challenges. This is partly because the data's main job is to provide a public record and guarantee title for owners, but it wasn’t designed for market research, which leads to challenges in extracting the data and potential delays in recording. The challenge I would like to focus on in this blog is especially troubling: it looks like some sales may be deliberately hidden, with their true price kept secret.
“In our range of interest (above 25ha), we confirmed that 24 of these were actual sales with values between £132,000 and £28M, the largest of which was 11,572Ha.”
Unfortunately, this means we could be missing sales and our data is almost certainly underestimating the true value of the market. This comes at the expense of transparency, which is crucial for accurately understanding the evolution of the Scottish rural land market. If this practice increases, it can skew the official data, potentially misleading policymakers, landowners, and the public.
We need transparency, especially with the Land Reform Bill, coming into force, so we can accurately evaluate its effect on the market. Fixing how transactions are recorded is a simple change, but it’s essential for making better decisions about Scotland’s land. To inform everyone, from experts to decision-makers, and finally meet our land reform ambitions, we must fundamentally transform how land data is collected and accessed. We at the commission, look forward to working with partners to deliver this crucial change.
