Median price at August 2008: £170,324

General increase since Sept 2007: 4%

Projected increase to Sept 2009: 0%

Five-year increase: 74% (£97,826)

Ten-year increase: 169% (£63,235)

(Median prices for Glasgow are for the city as a whole)

The complete price guide: Glasgow North

We reported a sense of déjà vu in Glasgow’s northerly outposts in 2007. Market conditions called to mind the hesitant climate of mid-2004, when interest rates began to rise and the harbingers of house-price doom began to make their crash predictions.

Twelve months on, that familiar theme has continued to develop and the blip has become a full-blown chill. Lenders have tightened their belts and sellers can’t commit to a changing market which has moved in buyers’ favour.

As ever, it is hard to be definitive about Glasgow North — doubly so in the current conditions. This is an area which effectively comprises two distinct markets: one rarefied, well-heeled and stolidly middle-class; the other parochial and pedestrian in pace. The best houses in Bearsden and Milngavie are as recession-proof a proposition as you will find anywhere in Glasgow, but even here location is everything and prices can vary from street to street and house to house. The other side of the Glasgow North coin comprises less vaunted areas such as Springburn and Millerston and, despite its proximity to the hot spots of Bearsden and Milngavie, is a world away.

It’s true that Glasgow North currently holds the Glasgow residential price record, but otherwise the hot-spot dwellers have been hit hard by the triple whammy of successive interest rate rises, rising household costs (especially for utilities), property taxation and prices outstripping real incomes. As last year, in this environment, the best agents are earning their corn with competitive pricing rather than pie-in-the-sky promises to win clients’ business but the net effect is unspectacular.

This year’s message is: sell before you buy, consider any reasonable offers seriously and, if you can make a clean offer without being part of a chain, bargain hard to make sure that what you lose on a sale you can more than make up with a purchase.

The Glasgow residential price record was smashed by John Pirrie, the power generator magnate, but that was in 2006. The entrepreneur spent a fraction of the fortune accrued from the £60m sale of LCH, the company he formed with his brother James, to break the Glasgow record with a £2.1m purchase in Bearsden late last summer. Pirrie’s successful bid was around £700,000 more than the previous top sale, also in Bearsden.

The Glasgow Solicitors Property Centre foresees no growth over the next year, but Rettie’s Bryce McCall Smith for one takes issue with the prediction, saying there are likely to be more winners and losers in the next 12 months. “While some areas and properties will hold their values, the overall trend has been a return to 2007 values rather than prices holding up,” he says. “Supply and location are still important and there will be exceptions to any rule, with the right properties still selling for prices which reflect an increase on last year.”

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