Week after week throughout the summer, a variety of Scotland’s leading newspapers have carried ill-informed allegations about Home Reports and their impact on Scotland’s housing market. These do no service to their readers and contribute instead to yet greater confusion amongst anyone thinking about buying or selling a house.

To all but the most biased observers, it is quite clear that Scotland’s housing market, like that in England, is suffering not as a result, of the Home Report, but rather from the impact of the economic climate, low levels of consumer confidence and the dearth of available mortgages. This is, surely, the real issue in the market.

Critics allege that Scotland’s housing market is suffering from a shortage of available stock while the housing market in England has taken off following the coalition Government’s scrapping of Home Information Packs (HIPs).

This is almost certainly untrue: according to Mark Horden of Glasgow Solicitors Property Centre: “there is a perfectly adequate supply of houses available for sale given the level of demand”. This view is echoed by Willie Hunter, a Director of both Hunter’s Residential and the Edinburgh Solicitors Property Centre: “for the past four or five months the number of properties coming onto the market has doubled and supply is exceeding demand so the issue for us is shifting stock”.