The head of Scotland's largest estate agents has broken ranks to launch an extraordinary attack on politicians, including Alex Salmond, and property experts who have claimed repeatedly that house prices in Scotland are still rising despite the credit crunch.

Michael Luck, the managing director of Slater Hogg & Howison, which runs 1,000 outlets across Britain, has accused the First Minister and others of talking “patronising nonsense” by maintaining that the Scottish housing market is proving more resilient and bucking the trend in the rest of the UK.

Mr Luck says that to back up their case they are using out-of-date figures that refer to transactions made six to nine months ago, but are being recorded only now, and have nothing to do with the market as it stands.

He told The Times: “There is a crazy mood among housing professionals and others that the public in some way can be convinced of the opposite of what is really going on.

“No one with any common sense looking at the market in the street where they live should believe the nonsense that has appeared.

“Scotland has followed exactly the same trend as England. It is no better up here than anywhere else in the country.”

Mr Luck's comments are aimed at other estate agents, bankers, lawyers and politicians. Only on Tuesday, in a lecture in Edinburgh, Mr Salmond said: “Scottish house prices appear fairly stable in comparison to other areas - with prices in Scotland increasing by 2.9 per cent since the start of this year, compared to a fall of 2.8 per cent across the UK.”

Mr Luck said: “Those in positions of influence think that if they say something like that, they are providing reassurance and that the market will follow but that is patronising and people should not be patronised in that way.

“I do not know where he [Mr Salmond] is getting his numbers or where they come from but if he is basing his comments on recent house price surveys I would say they have no validity at all. They may be figures from transactions as far back as October last year which have not appeared in Sasines (the Scottish register of property sales) until May or June. Comments that house prices in Scotland are continuing to rise are simply not true.”

Mr Luck's forthright views run directly counter not only to Mr Salmond's analysis but also to a Lloyds TSB survey published last week that said that Scottish house prices were bucking the wider British trend by growing modestly. It claimed that house prices in Scotland rose this year by 1.6 per cent in the three months to July 31, bringing the average cost of a home north of the Border to £172,185. It added that the cost of Scottish homes had risen by 9.3 per cent over the year but also showed that the number of houses being sold in Scotland had dropped by 27 per cent in the three months to the end of July this year.

A spokesman for Lloyds TSB Scotland disputed Mr Luck's comments, saying that its survey was based on actual mortgage transactions involving its customers and conducted in the quarter ended July 31. He added: “We have been running this survey for many years and it is a sound statistical sample.”

A spokesman for the First Minister said that the house price figures that he had quoted in his Edinburgh lecture had come from the Department for Communities and Local Government in Whitehall and had been published this month.

He added: “A range of information indicates that the Scottish economy in general, including the housing market, has so far proved more resilient than the UK as a whole but that leaves absolutely no room for complacency.

“That is exactly why the Scottish Government has announced key interventions to help the housing sector and the wider economy, including accelerating investment in affordable housing.”

He added that in June the SNP Government announced plans, costing £25million, to support homeowners facing repossession by building on the existing mortgage to rent scheme and encouraging shared equity schemes.

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