Stamp duty changes

[Mrsladybirdface]

What's your thoughts.

fairer I think but will increase house process in my area in the short term and we definitely don't need that.

[Mrsladybirdface]

obviously add I'm the missing question marks

[GozerTheGozerian]

Selfishly I am delighted because we are in process of buying a house, and this is going to save us £3k. I suppose it will be further boost to house prices as it does free up immediate cash, rather than making mortgages cheaper for example, so I had to factor in stamp duty costs to our offer. Good news in general I think - it was pretty ridiculous before.

[minipie]

Much fairer than the old system, long overdue, and will hopefully avoid the problem of pricing bottlenecks around stamp duty thresholds.

It will decrease house prices on >1m houses (eg a lot of London) but I don't think that's a bad thing, and any decreases will be relatively small in proportion to the price of the property.

[AMinorBird]

We want to sell next year and this should save us and our buyers a few thousand pounds but, more importantly, will hopefully stabilise the market as I think it was going to get jittery coming up to the election with the possible introduction of a mansion tax. There's no way that can happen now with a 12% top rate of stamp duty. My only worry is that a slowdown at the top of the market must filter down to us little people in one way or the other.

A graduated tax is definitely fairer though and good news for everyone. It would have saved us loads when we bought our house for just over £250k a few years ago.

[specialsubject]

interesting one - I also think long overdue. Although my maths is that up to about £250k it makes no difference; you pay twice the duty on half the amount if you see what I mean.

Asking prices may go up - but prices achieved are very different. As some research where I live reveals.

[MarcoPoloCX]

I am sure they claw back the money from somewhere else.

[AgaPanthers]

Obviously it's going to push up prices around the £250k mark. Which is pretty much the average house price.

So bad news for buyers really.

[Mulledwineandmincepies]

Is the proposed change in Scotland still not being enforced until next April?

[RaphaellaTheSpanishWaterDog]

I agree it's long overdue.....and as someone about to exchange on our next purchase we will save a few thousand £££ so good news for us!

[pinkglitter80]

gutting - just dropped our sale price to 499 and got offer and now need to offer on house we want tonight, but we def. wouldn't have dropped price so much ..

[Outflewthewassail]

We exchanged contracts on our new property this week and complete on Monday - am I right in thinking we qualify? That would be a much needed £5k towards our new home.

[TheTravellingLemon]

I am delighted in a purely selfish way. Due to exchange in a couple of weeks and will save a few grand. Thank you very much Mr Osborne, I'll take that and replace the knackered boiler!

[TheTravellingLemon]

Anyone completing after midnight tonight falls under the new system.

[F4ttyBumBum]

Much fairer for houses priced between £250-500k.

[LizzieMint]

Making it graduated is so much more sensible. Our house is one hovering around one of the old thresholds and it just leads to ridiculous fudging of asking prices. Will make very little difference to our buyer though, when we get one, I worked out it'd be only £500 cheaper.

[Doobledootch]

If you've exchanged then you can still pay under the old system, but if you've only made an offer and have to pay more SDLT as a result then you will have to pay more.

It's not quite true that up to £250K you'll have to pay the same if you paid £126K yesterday you would have to pay £1,260 in stamp duty, now you'd pay £20.

It is a much fairer way to tax but it will probably push prices up in the short term, having say £2K extra to put into a deposit would mean having an extra £8K on a 75% mortgage or £20K on a 10% mortgage, if you could get that approved of course.

So this change will probably only save money for people who are already in contract.

[Threesoundslikealot]

We're in possibly a fairly unusual position where we stand to lose out a bit in two ways. Firstly, we are putting our house on the market soon and it's been valued at 950k achievable price. We are in a position of needing to sell because we had serious structural problems and had to borrow huge amounts to get the work done, and now need to pay it off, so although our house has risen in value considerably since we bought it (SE London), our equity isn't particularly huge. So now 925k will become the new stamp duty threshold and we can't hope for that little extra.

Second, we are moving out of London and looking to buy around 500k. Now that barrier is gone, the stuff on the market for 550k will actually want to sell at that, and I think prices will rise around that amount, so we'll probably have to pay more.

So for us, we'll probably lose out quite a bit.

HOWEVER, I think overall this is a good move, reflecting the changes in house value, and helping people at the bottom of the ladder. I just wish they hadn't picked 925k so precisely!

[minipie]

Three how is 925k the new stamp duty threshold? What am I missing?

[minipie]

Oh I see, that's the point at which the old rules were better than the new rules.

I don't think that's the same as a new threshold though? It's not like the old thresholds where there was a sudden jump in duty and so people would try to negotiate to below the threshold. This just means people around 925k will be a bit p*ssed off that they are paying more than they would have last year. But they won't be able to save lots of money by negotiating down to below 925k. I haven't done the maths but the stamp duty difference between 925k and 950k is going to be pretty small.

[bilbodog]

Threesoundslikealot - if you are marketing at £925,000 then you are likely to get offers less than this - it is only after £937,500 that you buyers would have to pay more than the old system i.e. if you sell for £900K they would have had to pay £36K now they will save £1K and pay £35K. Around 500K you will either pay exactly the same as before or less.

[Threesoundslikealot]

The new thresholds are 125,000, 250,000, 925,000 and 1.5m.

[Threesoundslikealot]

No, we weren't going to market at 925k. We were told to market for 1m/1.1m with the aim of getting 950k. I have since read about the 937,500 crossover, so I suppose prices around that will become the new limit.

Around 500k we will pay less stamp duty than before, but my point is that houses that owners currently know they will only get 500k for because of the threshold could now be expected to sell for more. So our stamp duty saving could well be eroded by higher asking prices.

[Doobledootch]

Three you're going to have a hard job getting many people to feel sorry for you selling your million pound house to buy one at half the price to be honest

I would have thought that the new thresholds probably won't be as much of a barrier as the old ones though. People will soon forget that they would have been paying less under the old system and because the increase will now only apply to the bit above rather than the whole price it won't be quite as off putting to go above.

Also factor in that people generally don't take an economically rational approach to buying houses and you'll probably be fine.

[Threesoundslikealot]

Don't worry, I'm not after sympathy! Although as I said, our equity is pretty small after everything that's gone on, so we're only moving to have a mortgage that doesn't keep us awake at night (and perhaps be able to afford a takeaway now and then). We are incredibly lucky to have a route out of our crisis, even if we never planned to sell our place now.