house sale completed one week after the three-year stamp duty refund limit

[LouiseTopaz]

Our house sale is set to be completed one week after the three-year stamp duty refund limit. Does anyone know if it's still possible to claim it back?

I don't know for sure but a deadline is just that so I'd be very surprised if you could claim it back.

I would be desperately trying to push completion forward.
And I'd double check if it's the exchange date or completion date that matters - there was something when they changed stamp duty at the last budget that sales that were "substantially complete" fell under the old rules - and I think that meant exchanged but not completed.

However, if completion is the requirement, I think you are out of luck. Sorry.

I'd ask solicitor and estate agents if there is snything they can do to bring it forward.

The Gov portal says:
Exceptional circumstances
You may still be able to apply for a refund, if you purchased your new home on or after 1 January 2017 and were unable to sell your previous home within 3 years. To be able to get the refund, the delay in selling must be because of exceptional circumstances. These may be, but are not limited to:

• the impact of government imposed restrictions preventing the sale
• an action taken by a public authority preventing the sale

Once the reason has ended, you must sell the previous home to be able to apply for a refund.

Looks like a slow sales process would not be an exceptional circumstance.

Why sail so close to the wind?

There has to be a deadline somewhere. Whilst extremely frustrating you have unfortunately missed the deadline, so nothing that can be done.

Our house took over a year to sell, fell through 3 times and then our buyers have been incredibly slow, it took them three months just to submit basic information to the solicitor.

Did you incentivise early completion? There's a significant financial benefit to you, but if there was nothing in it for them why would they rush..

Yeah we did, we bought our house after lockdown we've made no money from our property, just a significant loss so this just adds to it. They don't have a chain they are currently renting. We just didn't hear from them for 3 months until we threatened to start doing viewings again.

I think @DogInATent was asking whether or not you had given your buyers a financial incentive to proceed rapidly rather than whether you have gained or lost money from your sale.
It sounds as if you may have chosen to rent the house out for a while or delay the sale for 2 years for a different reason. Unfortunately, the market has been very slow moving in a lot of areas in the past 2+ years with lots of reductions and lots of fall throughs too so many sales have taken a very long time.
Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that you will be able to claim the extra SDLT back if your sale doesn't complete within the 3 years. All you can do at this stage is offer a reduction to your buyers if the completion happens before the cut off.

Have you been proactive and offered them a cash incentive to complete before the deadline?

Or have you sat back on your arse for three months expecting them to move things forward?

Yes we did, and no we never rented the property out, and no we never delayed the sale.

Are you saying that you have been marketing your property for more than 3 years and you are only just nearing completion @LouiseTopaz?

If that's the case, something has clearly gone very wrong in terms of the decision making wrt the sale and over a very long period.
From what you said earlier, it doesn't sound as if you have been very proactive with the current buyers 'we just didn't hear from them for 3 months'. Most people would have chased them after a week.
As I said, all you can do now is be as proactive as possible and consider offering them an incentive to complete before your deadline.

I've never said that, there's a lot of assumptions being made, if we were nearly 3 years marketing we would have moved in and purchased the property to potentially move straight bk out.. which makes no sense ? We didn't purchase the property to make money from it, it was a family home and I'm unsure why it even matters. The answer to my question should have been yes or no. Of course we chased, literally every week but the estate agents kept telling us different things. The market is not great in the area we live in, houses over 300k are not selling. Another couple who put a bid in on our property has been trying to sell their new build house at the 500k mark for more than a year now, it's how things are here.

Sorry OP but your explanation is still as clear as mud.

So you bought a new house but you didn’t manage to sell the old one for 3 years?

On the face of it the answer is No. You don't appear to have any relevant extenuating circumstances.

But you've misconstrued and provided a confused response to every attempt to explain to you ways you might encourage things to proceed before the deadline, assuming there's still some time between now and the expiry of the 3-year limitation.

"we chased, literally every week but the estate agents kept telling us different things" - it's very unfashionable to say this on MN, but this is why you should be getting direct contact details for your Buyer and talking to them directly and not relying on the Agent. Particularly when you have a deadline that's important to you, but important only to you. You should have attempted to make this deadline important to your Buyer too.

If you directly contact a buyer outside of a solicitor nothing is legally binding, it's the Christmas period the solicitors were shut from the 24th until today, the deadline is the 3rd. Not much else can be done to move this along. That was never my original question

That's what it sounds like, although the story keeps changing whenever you try to clarify what has happened.
I can't see any exceptional circumstances here, just lots of confusion!

Your original question has been answered.

But your extra details and commentary highlight a lot of common mistakes and misunderstandings that MNetters have with buying and selling property.