Unveiling Trends and the Need for Accessible Land Data in Scotland

This week we published the 2024 Rural Land Market Data Report, the latest in our series looking at sales in Scotland’s rural land market over recent years.

This report, which now covers four years from 2020 – 2023, uses data from Registers of Scotland (RoS) to examine the frequency, value and size of land sales across rural Scotland.

Some of the headlines from this report include:

• Only 0.5% of Scotland’s land changed hands in 2023 with fewer transactions covering a smaller land area reflecting a slowdown in sales compared to previous years.
• The influence of forestry, which had driven rapid price increases, especially in the South West, appears to have peaked in 2021/22. In 2023, the number, area, and value of forestry sales declined from these earlier highs, with the total area sold down by 54% compared to 2022.
• The report adds weight to increasingly important assessments of the number of large-scale land sales each year, finding only 26 sales over the four-year period 2020-2023 larger than 1,000ha (between four and 11 sales each year). The land market continues to be dominated by transactions of relatively small areas, with 94.5% of sales under 500ha in 2023.

One of the key reasons we do this analysis year on year is because we think it provides an understanding of the land market that is vital for those working on a whole range of policy objectives. From the Land Reform Bill to the new Natural Capital Market Framework, an understanding of the way the market currently operates is important for those trying to shape activity, either through regulation, guidance or incentives.

When paired with the Insights Report we publish each year, based on interviews with land agents, these two reports provide one of the most detailed views of Scotland’s rural land market available. Yet the report also highlights ongoing challenges with land data in Scotland. The truth is that Scotland’s land data isn’t up to scratch, and isn’t able to support effective policy-making without significant time and cost implications.

There are growing calls for change. In 2024 academics from the James Hutton Institute reviewed 18 available data sources for Scottish landownership and concluded that no single data set is fit-for-purpose for research supporting land-based policy objectives, and that even combining multiple data sources is overly complicated and resource intensive in terms of time and funding. Our own research has identified a number of challenges with RoS data, with numerous data gaps and challenges for data standardisation. Producing data for research purposes is not currently part of RoS’s core remit, but earlier this year a group of academics working on RESAS-funded projects called for improvements to data availability for policy including; creating a trusted research environment for landownership data, creating statutory requirements for RoS to share data with publicly-funded research and standardising RoS data entry. In 2023, Andy Wightman called for a national land information system to enable the systematic and integrated collection and dissemination of land information for businesses, the public, government and its agencies and academics.

We’re not the only ones who think that accessible land data is a fundamental building block of land reform. We will continue to publish our rural land markets reports, but over the coming year we will also be stepping up our work with others to improve the quality and accessibility of land data. It’s vital we develop integrated, accessible data to underpin evidence-based land reform policy.