The Property: Listed Victorian church

The Place: Aberfeldy, Perth & Kinross, Scotland

The Price: £190,000 OIEO

The Pain: It’s a big and potentially expensive project – all the more so since planning permission is for conversion into four large apartments.

And at the end, you’ll have to find four buyers to make your money – which in the current market is not the easiest.

The Gain: The property is attractively located in an elevated position with fine views over the countryside and is perfectly placed to attract second-home buyers – fishing, hiking, golf, skiing and water sports are all within easy reach.

The building itself is in good shape, and has some fine period features.

When completed, the apartments, says the agent, will be worth £200,000-£300,000, so there’s potential for a decent return on this one.

The Agent: Strutt & Parker, Edinburgh (Tel: 0843 2823 308)

With this year’s Edinburgh Festival almost in its closing stages, we decided to don our tartan bonnets and kilts, and hotfoot it north to Scotland’s capital city.

As well as hosting the world’s most famous arts festival and being home to the globe’s biggest Hogmanay party, Edinburgh always ranks highly on those Most Fabulous Places to Live lists on account of it being so unutterably cool.

With all that in mind, we’ve only picked properties that are in or close to the city centre, and therefore well placed to take advantage of everything that “Auld Reekie” has to offer.

So, in the words of one of the city’s illustrious former residents, Muriel Spark, here’s the crème de la crème of Edinburgh properties for a variety of budgets.

(Click on pics for full property details)

1. Blackhall, Edinburgh
£2,300,000 OIRO

2. Warriston, Edinburgh
£1,100,000 OIRO

3. New Town, Edinburgh
£975,000 OIEO

4. Edinburgh City Centre
£340,000 OIEO

5. Corstorphine, Edinburgh
£245,000 OIEO

Barry over in the Build Cool New Stuff team has done it again: his latest wheeze is a very handy Add Notes tool on every property detail.

Keep an eye open for this icon - it’s on the right hand side of every property detail.

As a registered user you can click on this, write some comments in the pop-up box – what you think of the property, why it might be worth viewing and so on - and save it.

The note will remain on this property detail (as one of the icons on the right hand side) and the property itself will automatically save to your Saved Properties folder (it can be accessed via the purple house icon at the top of the page).

The Add Note feature is a great way to record your thoughts about properties as you browse.

What’s handy about this is that when you check them again you’ll immediately be reminded about what you liked and disliked without having to read through the entire details.

Nice, no?!

This week’s graph comes from the Office of National Statistics and charts the level of house-building activity in England.

According to the latest figures, there were 29,980 housing starts in the quarter to June, a 63 per cent increase on the previous quarter.

This is the second successive quarterly rise but the year-on-year figures show that the number of new homes being built was down nine per cent on quarter two 2008.

Housing completions, meanwhile, were up 24 per cent over the quarter and were up seven per cent year-on-year.

The data does suggest that the house-building industry – which was hammered by the credit crunch – is over the worst, but this level of construction is a far cry from the Government target of 240,000 new homes per year.

Small wonder, then, that Professor Steve Nickell from the Government’s National Housing and Planning Advice Unit (NHPAU), has warned that lack of housing will put the pressure back on prices and aggravate the affordability crisis:

“Recessions do not have a big impact on household growth but they do cause a dip in house-building … and declining affordability is having increasingly severe impacts.

“Worsening overcrowding; lengthening social housing waiting lists; first-time buyers finding it harder to get on to the housing ladder; and adult children living with parents for longer are the direct effects.

“But there are also likely to be increasingly serious wider economic and social consequences if we do not manage to bring the supply and demand for housing back towards balance and start tackling the backlog of unmet need.

“We risk even greater volatility in house prices with the potential for even more extreme boom and bust cycles – with knock-on effects for the wider economy.”

Take part in our short survey on DIY and you could win yourself £25 M&S vouchers!

The Property: A Grade A listed folly built around 1840

The Place: Keltneybridge, Kenmore, Perthshire PH15

The Price: OIEO £150,000

(Click on pics for full property details)

The Pain: Well, it’s in a pretty poor state and needs complete renovation – and that includes renewing the services (water, septic tank, mains electricity).

It’s Grade A listed – Grade I in England – so you will be restricted in what you can do.

The Scottish Offers Over system means it will probably fetch a lot more than £150,000 and the price of the renovation is estimated at around £60,000.

The Gain: This really is a one off – a unique and quirky home that looks a bit like a Chinese pavilion.

Some wonderful original features are still intact, notably the slate roof and the high piend-roofed portico at the front with undulating eaves and distinctive rustic log colonnades, painted in a striking red.

The underside of the portico is elaborately decorated and there are other unusual decorative elements in the stonework of the building. The agent reckons when finished it will be worth up to £250,000.

It’s most likely going to be a lifestyle purchase and would make a fantastic second home – the surrounding countryside is beautiful and there are numerous facilities to keep you entertained: nine and 18 hole golf courses, sailing and watersports, salmon and trout fishing on lochs and rivers, climbing and walking.

Rustic Lodge lies approximately 1.7 miles east of Kenmore, an 18th century planned settlement at the mouth of Loch Tay. The village provides local shopping, post office, hotel and church.

The Agent: Savills (Tel: 01738 477525)

Oh, we all love to be beside the seaside, as the famous ditty goes, so this week we’re taking a look at properties with sea views.

Since we’re not short on coastal locations in Britain, being an island and all, we’ve focused our attention on the South West corner, namely Devon and Cornwall, both of which are famed for their stunning beaches.

Although we’ve include a couple of top-priced examples to drool over, the good news is that you don’t have to spend a fortune for the privilege of being able to see the sea from the comfort of your own home.

Make the most of it, though, as a government plan has been mooted whereby extra council tax would be levied on properties with attractive views. Boo!

(Click on pics for full property details)

1. Torpoint, Cornwall
£1.5 million

2. Kingswear, Devon
£1.5 million (O.I.R.O.)

3. Preston, Devon
£399,950

4. Newquay, Cornwall
£245,000

5. Westward Ho!, Devon
£149,950

It’s no surprise to be told that a sea view will cost you. But how much more are vendors willing to pay?

The clever number-crunchers over at Savills have taken a look at the 12,000 sales that took place in Cornwall in 2008 and have come up with some very precise figures.

While there are significant variations around the average, depending on property type, location, and privacy, the heftiest premium is for detached properties within 100m of the coastline.

In 2008, these properties fetched a whopping average price of £525,168 while those between 100m and 250m from the coast averaged £460,585.

This means they come with premiums of as much as 85 per cent and 63 per cent respectively over comparable inland properties.

The premium often continues to be more than 50 per cent for properties between 100m and 250m of the coast, and although it tapers off beyond this distance there remains an average premium of 31 per cent within 1km of the coast.

I was wandering around the Neocribs blog the other day when I came across this … a hairy rough-hewn hunter-gatherer kind of a house in the middle of a Swedish forest.

Being Swedish, of course, it’s also beautifully designed – a perfectly pitched combination of Red Cedar wood shingles, Birch lattice, plasterwork, and reindeer fur.

Reindeer fur?? Yep, there’s a whole room clad with the stuff – and very snug, if slightly kinky, it looks too.

The building is an extension to an original cabin from the 1800s located on the shore of lake Övre Gla in the Glaskogen nature reserve in Sweden.

Wonder what would happen if you tried to get planning permission for a wildly experimental fur-lined cabin in the middle of a nature reserve in England…?

Copyright photographs courtesy of James Silverman

Project: Dragspelhuset at Övre Gla

Client: Fam. Zeisser Architect

Architect: 24H > architecture

I have to admit, before I started working at FindaProperty.com, I’d never heard of oast houses.

Maybe that’s because they’re mainly located in the South of England and I grew up many miles away in Scotland.  Or maybe it’s just because my architectural knowledge is somewhat lacking.

Whatever the reason, I’ve subsequently become a fan of these curious, conical-roofed structures, and think they’re a wonderful reminder of the bygone world of hop-farming in southern regions such as Kent and Sussex.

But hop-farming’s loss has been property’s gain, and since the 1960s, many former oast houses have been converted into beautiful and distinctive homes, with the added bonus of being part of England’s brewing history. Cheers to that!

Here are five glorious oast houses that are currently for sale (beer goggles not required):

(Click on pics for full property details)

1. Lamberhurst, East Sussex
£1,450,000

2. Crowhurst Oast, East Peckham, Kent
£ 650,000

3. Ightham, Kent
£1,000,000

4. Rural Matfield, Kent
£995,000

5. Rushlake Green, East Sussex
£450,000