The UK’s largest conveyancing provider, My Home Move, has reported a 46% rise in buy-to-let and second home activity.
The increase has been since November when Chancellor George Osborne announced a 3% Stamp Duty surcharge on all second home purchases, including buy-to-lets.
The surcharge is to be implemented in three weeks’ time on April 1.
My Home Move’s research found that 99% of conveyancers report a rise in the number of clients wanting to complete purchases before the deadline.
My Home Move CEO Doug Crawford said that his earlier forecast, that the property market would be ‘turbo-charged’ for the first part of the year, had been realised.
My Home Move has also reported a surge in inquiries from people looking to purchase additional properties as a registered company – hoping to win tax advantages.
Details of the Stamp Duty surcharge are due to be revealed in next week’s Budget.
Meanwhile, the RICS said this morning that it expects house price inflation to slow once the Stamp Duty changes have been introduced.
The slowdown is predicted to follow what the RICS describes as a “short-term rush on buy-to-let properties”.
The LSL/Acadata survey, also out this morning, said house price growth in February doubled on a monthly basis because of a “boom” in buy-to-let sales.
It said this helped fuel a surge in home sales, up 12% month on month, and up 9.3% compared with February last year.
It’s very dangerous and a little premature to state ‘The surcharge is to be implemented in three weeks’ time on April 1.’ Surely it should be stated that ‘the planned rise’ and planned to be implemented’. This ‘scheme’ was only reviewed last month, there could be many changes and in fact it could still not come in.. Of course, all the ‘hype’ around this has pushed sales up, instructions up and conveyancers are feeling the pressure. However, ‘make hay’. Come April 1st, if the ‘planned’ scheme comes into force then we can expect investors to disappear, or at least subtract the ‘planned’ extra stamp duty from their offer.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a Government ‘leak’ to stimulate the market and at the very least it won’t affect major investors (there’s a ‘plan’ within the ‘plan’ to let investors, with more than 15 properties’ escape the extra SDLT)
I for one will be glued to the screen come the 16th to see what the ‘plan’ is and what the exemptions are. Lets just be careful of the words we use!
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JMC – you are of course correct.
That being said – would you wager a months’ salary on the outcome being anything other than the new tax being implemented?
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