Median price at August 2008: £214,398

General increase since Sept 2007: 8%

Projected increase to Sept 2009: 6%

Five-year increase: 119% (£97,772)

Ten-year increase: 190% (£73,995)

The complete Aberdeenshire and Kincardineshire price guide

Largely due to the boom in its capital and centre, Aberdeenshire is one of only five local authority areas, according to the Registers of Scotland, with an average house price over £175,000. And like the similarly much-vaunted environs of East Dunbartonshire, East Lothian, East Renfrewshire and Edinburgh, it is easy to see why.

Despite being a market where 60% of buyers are locals trading up, Aberdeenshire has enjoyed average price growth of 119% in the last five years, according to HBOS. The past decade has seen average prices almost double again (190%).

Last time, Strutt & Parker’s David Strang Steel identified the key market driver as a widespread short supply of the area's most popular period homes. Buoyed by rising local prosperity on the back of oil prices, the county, with its stellar combination of pretty settlements, good schools and pleasant countryside, has streaked ahead during the boom years. Add high wheat and barley prices and their positive effect on the agricultural economy, new academic jobs and the expansion of local alternative energy research, and you have a glut of people competing for homes.

Not least because Aberdeenshire has one of the strictest attitudes to development in Scotland. That’s good news if you are an existing owner-occupier, but not so great if you want to get on the local ladder at a time of restricted borrowing — or you dream of siting a multimillion-pound golf complex there.

According to Tony Dawson, of James & George Collie, prices slacken the further out from Aberdeen you go. However, planned improvements in the county’s road and rail network would, if current conditions continue, presumably lead to further and wider competition from executive commuters seeking a rural base for their families. So there could be no advantage in hanging around hoping to strike a deal if things bottom out. Indeed, there is no sense of things bottoming out any time soon in Aberdeenshire: buy now and buy the best house you can afford.

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