Edinburgh house prices rise in line with London but Aberdeen slump begins

However, Aberdeen’s property market has bucked the national trend and is now the only major city in the UK where prices are slowing down.

Those were among the findings of Hometrack’s latest UK Cities Index, which monitors house prices in 20 urban centres around the UK.

The report found, overall, that house prices rose by 4.3 per cent in the UK’s cities between May and July 2015, the highest quarterly growth for 11 years.

The highest year-on-year growth in a single city was 10.9 per cent in Cambridge.

But while revealing that Edinburgh is catching up with London, and now joins Bristol and Southampton as the areas “snapping on London’s heels”, prices in Glasgow remain well below their pre-recession peak having grown by just 5.5 per cent.

And the slump in the North Sea oil and gas industry seems to now be hitting house prices in Aberdeen where a drop of 0.7 per cent was recorded.

Aberdeen was the only one of the 20 cities surveyed where house price growth is not greater than the current 2.4 per cent increase in average earnings.

The average cost of a home in the city is now £192,600, just 1.3 per cent up in the last three months.

Meanwhile, a seperate report from the Council of Mortgage Lenders revealed that mortgage lending in the UK reached its highest monthly total for seven years in July.

Lending stood at an estimated £22 billion for the month, marking an increase of almost £2bn compared to June, and up £2.6bn on the same month last year.

The CML said mortgage lending remains on track to hit £209bn for the calendar year. That would mean an increase of three per cent on 2014, and represent the highest annual lending since 2008.