Improving Reporting of Land Market Transactions

The objectives for this work are to: i) analyse and report on the current pattern of activity within Scotland’s rural land market to provide an accurate picture of landowner, buyer, and seller motivations, with a specific focus on understanding of how increased demand for natural capital investment is driving activity in the land market; and ii) to develop a replicable methodology for gathering robust quantitative and qualitative data about land market activity in the future.

The proposed methodology includes: i) a scoping phase including stakeholder interviews and a rapid assessment of available evidence on land markets; ii) collation and analysis of data from Registers of Scotland on land transactions; iii) interviews with land agents and data collation from land agents; iv) synthesis of the evidence base and proposing a future approach to assessing rural land market activity and market drivers on an annual basis.