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A bad end to last year in Scotland's residential property market has been followed by a much worse start to this year.

We've got figures out today from Registers of Scotland, the government agency required by law to include every property transaction that takes place, usually within a couple of weeks. These show the first quarter of 2009 saw a drop of 8.7% in the price of those properties changing hands, when compared with the final quarter of 2008.

Look at the year-on-year drop, and it's not quite so bad. Prices were still rising in the first half of last year, if you take this measure, so there's a 6.6% drop in average prices.

Drill down into the figures and you find the value of detached properties have fallen faster than typically cheaper properties. In leafy, well schooled East Renfrewshire, which saw the bubble expand more than elsewhere in the boom times, detached villas have dropped 28% in value during the year. In Edinburgh, detached houses rose in value.

Average transacted prices, meanwhile, went up over the past year in Angus, East Dunbartonshire, Falkirk, Moray and Orkney, though sometimes on the basis of quite small figures.

Terraced homes held their prices better than flats, which saw annual decline of 8.2%. This might be explained by the glut of new-build flats, most obviously in Edinburgh and Glasgow, with some evidence that developers have been dropping prices because they need the cash flow as a matter of survival. In Glasgow, more than 800 flats changed hands from January to March, with prices down 12% on the quarter and 13% on the year.

For those thinking of getting into the market as seller or buyer, the key figure is the 57% drop in the number of transactions over the past year. That demonstrates the lack of confidence in the market, as buyers stay out the market in the classic problem of deflation - the expectation that prices have further to fall, so it makes sense to hold off on a purchase.

The short-term fear of policy-makers is what could happen to the economy if that takes hold across the board. It's a very hard cycle to break, as the Japanese found in the 1990s.

And a further calculation from Registers of Scotland is the total value of transactions, down by 60% in a year. That directly impacts on those in the property industry. They depend on the amount of money flowing through the system, and it's impossible to sustain their employment levels on such a sharp drop.

But this is only one take on the state of the Scottish property market. There are other ways of taking the temperature.

Halifax and Nationwide have their own surveys, which tend to track each other quite closely as they have similar methodologies - taking a typical home in each bracket of the market, and seeing how it is performing in the market.

They agree that Scotland has had a much tougher start to the year than it saw last year, but the overall fall in the average Scottish price looks much steeper than the Registers of Scotland. The most recent Halifax figures, from March, show UK prices down 2% in a month and 17% in a year, while Scottish figures were 14% down in a year, but with a much steeper fall of 7% in the first quarter of the year.

Nationwide registered a 15% annual drop in Scottish prices, slightly less dramatic than the UK figure of 16%, but the drop in Q1 of this year was 5%.

Despite that, from the perspective of those wanting prices to hold up (and remember those wanting into the market take a different view), Nationwide rates Scotland as having been the best performer in holding up prices over five consecutive quarters.

Bear in mind that the average Scottish house is worth more than twice what it was 10 years ago, and 45% more than what it would have fetched five years ago. What matters to most people is how well their house would hold up if they had to move - that is, what could they buy for the money raised by selling? And for Scots, there's good news there.

With prices falling at different rates across the UK - up last month in north east England, while falling fastest in the West Midlands, according to England's Land Registry - the London benchmark has become more affordable.

Five years ago, the average London property would have cost 2.8 times more than the average in Scotland. That has fallen to 1.9 times as much.

And finally, on affordability, there are some significant figures from Halifax Bank of Scotland. Helped by falling prices and even more helped by falling interest rates, the cost of servicing a mortgage has come within reach of many more people starting out on the property ladder.

At the peak of the market in the third quarter of 2007, a typical mortgage payment for a new borrower in Scotland took 37% of disposable earnings.

The average over the past 25 years is 31%. But by the start of this year, that had fallen to 26%.

For those in search of green shoots, that affordability for first-time buyers looks like a good place to focus attention.

If only they had more confidence that prices will hold up.