Credit Crunch

Credit crunch doesn’t hit country estates

While most of the country wallows in a decline in the value of property, and while sellers are struggling to find buyers, it seems that the most expensive luxury estates in the country aren’t suffering a similar fate.

In Scotland, multi-million pound estates are readily selling to Scottish buyers rather than foreign buyers. In the last ten years, around 90% of the buyers of Scottish country estates were from overseas, but now more than half of new buyers are from Scotland.

John Coleman, one of the partners at Knight Frank estate agents, said, “There’s no doubt there’s money available in Scotland. We have no problem getting interest in country houses, farms and estates worth £5m and upwards. Some properties might just take a little longer to sell.”

Jamie McNab, a director of Savills estate agents, said, “Country houses are proving to be the most robust sector of the market and have been unaffected by the credit crunch. We may not quite have reached the peaks of last summer, but 2007 was an incredible year.”Edinburgh city market is suffering due to a lack of confidence among buyers as well as sellers. Blair Stewart, who is the head of Strutt & Parker’s Edinburgh residential department, said, “Although properties are selling, anything seen as overpriced is not shifting. The feeding frenzy in the housing market is over.”

Traditionally, the buyers of country houses and estates are ‘cash rich’ and don’t have to rely on getting mortgages, so the liquidity crisis in the banking sector has not had any noticeable impact on these buyers.

There is evidence however that the

He further said that he expects it will be at least another year before confidence in the market starts to return.