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IT is important that we know what property interests the new intake of MSPs have ahead of the next Holyrood term.
That’s why I spent weeks putting in parliamentarians' registered interests into a spreadsheet as they appeared randomly on the Scottish Parliament’s website.
Because of the 30-30 rule, MSPs had 30 days to declare their interests, and then Holyrood had 30 days to upload them to its website. Thankfully, this was drama-free, unlike their issues with the gender search facility on the website.
Once Neil Gray’s appeared earlier this week, we had the full picture – bar James Adams, who was newly elected for the Tories after Douglas Lumsden won the Aberdeen South by-election.
Adams is a councillor in Aberdeenshire, so he has a register on the local authority’s website, where he describes himself as a self-employed landlord.
You can see the full list of MSPs who are landlords, have rental properties, commercial properties, second homes and shares in real estate companies here.
Overall, there are 18 MSPs who are landlords, and nine more who have other related property interests.
That’s one-fifth of the current Scottish Parliament.
So why does it matter? And why did I spend a heatwave laboriously tracking heritable property interests in Google Sheets?
Well, housing is devolved. And this new raft of MSPs – and some returning ones – will be in charge of developing and scrutinising policies that will impact housing in Scotland.
We need to be aware of who has what interests and what impact that will have on their decision-making.
It ranges from the multimillionaires – looking at you Malcolm Offord and Alexander Burnett – to MSPs who have inherited shares in family properties.
Some have holiday lets, and others have second homes, like Scottish Labour MSP Claire Baker, who has a second home in France co-owned with her husband.
Some rent properties abroad, such as Reform UK’s Julie MacDougall, who has a rental flat in the Canary Islands, and LibDem MSP Duncan Dunlop, who has a semi-detached rental cottage in Montenegro.
Q Manivannan, sharing our investigation on Instagram, said that they had to list their house in India as a “consequence of being an immigrant” and that they have to have a home and permanent address in their country of origin while “renting in the country of residence”.
But it is important to note that all six Holyrood parties have at least one landlord in their ranks.
Scotland has a whole host of issues around housing.
There were 33,966 households assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness in the year to September 2025, according to Scottish Government figures.
There were 14,371 children assessed as homeless in the same period.
This is the equivalent of 39 children in Scotland becoming homeless every day.
There were 18,092 households trapped in temporary accommodation – an increase of 9% from the previous year – the highest number on record.
Not to mention the number of empty homes, second homes and holiday lets that are having a devastating impact on both Scotland’s rural and urban communities.
With the Housing Bill passed last term due to come into effect next year – which contained plans for rent controls among other protections – it will be more crucial than ever that we understand what interests MSPs have when they scrutinise housing policy and seek to address one of the biggest issues facing Scotland.
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