“Glasgow is more friendly and a bit more trendy than Edinburgh, in terms of its people,” says Ann Laird, chairman of the Friends of Glasgow West Association. Glasgow’s homeowners certainly have the bragging rights — house prices in the city are the fastest growing in the UK, nudging Edinburgh into second place. The average value in Glasgow jumped 5.1 per cent in the year to April 2019, according to Zoopla’s City House Price Index. In Edinburgh they rose 4 per cent. In London, prices dropped 0.5 per cent over the same period.

Most of the growth has been in Glasgow’s prime postcodes. Across the city, sales volumes are down — in the first three quarters of 2018, transactions fell 5 per cent, according to Rettie — but within the well-to-do addresses of West End, Southside, Newton Mearns and Bearsden and Milngavie (two suburbs popular with families), sales volumes between January and August were up 14 per cent on the previous year.

“In the last two years, we have achieved the best prices we have ever achieved,” says Iain Williamson, managing director at Ivy Property, “but you will only see that in [the postcodes] G3 and G12.”

In Glasgow’s West End (G12), the Victorians built villas, terraces and tenements in blond sandstone around the Botanic Gardens and Kelvingrove Park. The neighbourhood has “a visual richness” to it that is more akin to Edinburgh’s West End than Glasgow’s industrial areas, says Laird.

The average 2018 house sale price in G12 was £317,978, according to Rettie — 93 per cent above the city average. In nearby Partickhill, Rettie is marketing a contemporary four-bedroom detached house with a garden for £965,000.

So why are prices growing so quickly? Partly, it is a result of rising demand in a city that has gentrified quickly — but, according to Andrew Meehan, associate director at Rettie, it is chiefly down to the arrival of new high-priced homes. Between October 2017 and October 2018, prices of Glasgow’s new-build homes jumped 12 per cent, according to Savills.

Glasgow’s prime purchasers are largely local, says Meehan, who estimates 5 per cent of buyers come from abroad and 5 per cent from elsewhere in the UK. The market share held by international investors in the new-build sector is more than double that, between 10 and 20 per cent, says Mackie. Buyers of Scotland’s luxury homes have been deterred by the introduction of Land and Buildings Transaction Tax, say agents, which increased taxes on higher-priced homes. “We are past the hangover from that now,” says Cameron Ewer, head of residential sales at Savills Glasgow.