Edinburgh Council buys 4% of all homes sold in Edinburgh, FOI finds

If you are shopping for your first home in Edinburgh, you expect to have to deal with high prices and limited stock but what you don’t expect is to find the council outbidding you for your first home. But for many first time buyers, that is what has been happening.

Freedom of information figures from the City of Edinburgh Council show it has spent about £239 million buying 893 homes over the last three years.

Total spend by the council on home purchases rocketed from about £17 million to £110 million and then £112 million.

Year by year, the council bought:

109 homes in 2023/24,
435 in 2024/25 and
349 in 2025/26.

These were private homes already on the market, plus new-build homes bought from developers. Rather than homes the council had built itself.

In total 2024/25, purchases were nearly 4% of all homes sold in Edinburgh, up from about 1% the year before. Full-year sales figures for Edinburgh in 2025/26 are not out yet. So we cannot yet say what share the latest year’s 349 buys were.

What does that mean for you? Every home the council buys is one less home available for first time buyers.

The council says it is buying homes to help with Edinburgh’s housing emergency and pressure on temporary accommodation.

The figures do not say how many of the 893 homes went into temporary accommodation versus longer-term rent. They also do not measure what happened to prices for first-time buyers.

The council buying so many private homes, instead of using its resources to build new ones, will inevitably push prices higher for other buyers.

Instead of competing with first time buyers, and driving up demand, the council should use their resources and planning authority to increase the housing supply.

First Time Buyer 🏡

Edinburgh Council buys 4% of all homes sold in Edinburgh, FOI finds

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