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)

The complete price guide: Glasgow South

The complete price guide: East Renfrewshire

Michael Luck, the managing director of Slater Hogg & Howison, which runs 1,000 outlets across Britain, found himself on a collision course with Alex Salmond in August when he accused the first minister and others of talking “patronising nonsense” by maintaining that the Scottish housing market was proving more resilient and bucking the trend in the rest of the UK.

He told The Times: “There is a crazy mood among housing professionals and others that the public in some way can be convinced of the opposite of what is really going on. No one with any common sense looking at the market where they live should believe the nonsense that has appeared.”

Salmond, apparently quoting Whitehall statistics, said: “Scottish house prices appear fairly stable, with prices in Scotland increasing by 2.9% since the start of this year, compared to a fall of 2.8% across the UK.”

So who is telling the truth and who is cooking the books?

Faisal Choudhry, head of Scottish research at estate agent Savills, says declining sales, not stagnant prices, are the real issue. “The Scottish market is just catching up with the rest of the country and is heading downhill,” he says. The debate over Salmond’s apparent use of outdated government figures is “meaningless”: the real story, he says, is not price falls but that “the number of transactions fell by 13% from Q1 2007 to Q1 2008. In some places it was as bad as 23%. A lack of activity and sales falling through [because buyers can't sell their homes in a timely fashion] — that’s the problem.”

Donald MacRae, chief economist with Lloyds TSB Scotland, concedes that “the price boom may well have passed into history” but insists “the Scottish market is demonstrating its traditional resilience”.

However, the current slowdown in west central Scotland really needs some context. As we noted last time, the period between the millennium and 2005 will be remembered as a golden age for homeowners on Glasgow’s southside in particular. Most have enjoyed five years of unfettered annual capital growth of anything between 15% and 20% each year, so after that, anything less is bound to be seen as a bit of a comedown.

Last year Slater Hogg & Howison’s Lisa Boyle believed that locals would be unrealistically underwhelmed by a second successive year of mid-single-figure growth. They have enjoyed a year and a half of stagnation even less but this has played out against a backdrop of average house-price growth of 169% since 1998, according to HBOS, and five-year growth of 74%.

The average Glasgow house bought for £63,235 at the start of the boom in 1998 is now worth £170,324, according to the lender. While denizens of the southside in particular have enjoyed totting up their paper prosperity for 10 years, the switch to a market favouring buyers, albeit those untroubled by the lenders’ straitened lending criteria, has been long overdue. A healthy market, sooner rather than later, must see prices fall back in step with earnings.

The price inflation of the decade’s first five years is unsustainable — especially while earnings remain static. A two-bed place in Stathbungo worth £105,000 in 2001, for example, will have accrued more than the average Scottish wage (about £25,000) in capital growth in five years.

Savills’ Peter Gillespie says the market figures both mask complex truths and ignore fundamental psychological motivations for buying and selling. “Here in the southside there are a series of micro-markets: houses are faring better than flats, traditional homes are faring better than new-builds and there are both opportunities and threats for buyers and sellers,” he says. “But, however the market appears, people will still have to move house for work, due to growing family sizes or to live within a particular school catchment. South of the river, these factors all hold just as much sway as market confidence.”

The key to the solidity of East Renfrewshire’s prices, for example, is prestigious school catchment areas. With Williamwood High, Mearns Castle and St Ninians all in The Sunday Times’s Parent Power top ten of Scotland’s best-performing secondary schools last year, East Renfrewshire is a magnet for middle-class parents.

Houses in these areas carry a price tag to match. Buying a family home within these catchment boundaries will set you back anywhere between 70% and 200% more than similarly appointed homes elsewhere in the same political constituency.

The capital growth party may be over on the southside, but there is equally strong evidence that life is carrying on much as before as buyers’ and sellers’ circumstances change. How prices fair this year will very much depend on how lending, interest rates and inflation play out in the next few months, but if these structural problems are addressed and the market regains its equilibrium, the current window of opportunity in the property market for bargain-seeking buyers could be slammed shut once more.

Times recommends

• Second homes: credit crunch casualty or money-spinner?
• How I built my own sliding house
• Top 10 incentives for house buyers