NEARLY all Scots looking in Glasgow and Edinburgh are struggling to find a flat share as demand across Scotland skyrockets.

A survey has found that 100% of those looking for a room in the country’s capital and 99% of those in Glasgow have recently found it difficult to find one.

The poll, by flat share website SpareRoom, found a staggering increase in demand for rooms – which is drastically outstripping supply.

In Glasgow, there is a 164% rise in demand vs supply in the third quarter of 2021 compared with the same period in 2020.

READ MORE: Scottish house prices surge by more than 15 per cent to new record high

In Edinburgh the rise is 138% and in Inverness it’s 89%. In Dundee it's 74%, and in Aberdeen 59%.

While the UK as a whole is seeing a similar trend with demand overwhelming supply, Scotland faces an increased share of people moving into the market, rather than within it.

“The real factor that's influencing it is it's not just people moving within the flatshare markets, it’s people who moved back into their parents or friends during lockdowns and wanting to move out again,” explains Matt Hutchinson, director of SpareRoom.

“Normally, the market has a bit of give and take in it. People move in, people move out, but every time somebody moves out of the room, that room becomes free. So they take a room, but they also vacate a room.

“But with so many people coming back into the market living with parents, there's a huge extra pressure on the market, because those people aren't freeing up any supply. They're just creating more demand, and it's created a real bottleneck.”

Hutchinson told The National that Scotland is seeing increased demand from this group as well as from people coming from outside of the UK.

He said: “The number of people moving back into the market from living with their parents is particularly high in Scotland.

“So for the UK average of people that we surveyed, 25% were looking for a room having moved back into their parents and wanting to move out again.

“But in Edinburgh that was 32% and in Glasgow it's 28%. So that's much higher than the national average.

“A lot of people in Scotland obviously had to move back in with parents over the past couple of years and now need their own place again.

“But the really, really big difference was, across the UK, we saw 14% of people looking for rooms were coming from outside the UK.

“But the Scottish numbers are pretty much double - Edinburgh is 25% in Glasgow 26%, so there's obviously a much higher percentage of people coming into the rental market in Scotland from overseas now.

“And that's partly down to the nature of being vibrant cities and having big universities and lots of lots of jobs as well.”

Underpinning all of this, Hutchinson said, is the long-running issue of a lack of affordable houses, with prices far higher than they were for older generations.

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“Even before the pandemic huge amount of people under the age of 35 were still living with their family or their parents,” he said.

“And part of that is that housing is incredibly unaffordable compared to a generation ago. And things are getting worse.

“We don't create enough supply to meet demand. So there was already a rental crisis before the pandemic, and we just happen to have found a particularly perfect storm towards the end of this year when there's been a lot of demand and not much supply.

“We need to do much more to create affordable housing for everybody, not just for young people, for families, individuals, for people at any stage in the journey, whether they want to rent or share or buy a property.”