Now homebuyers can breathe sigh of relief
HOUSE prices in England and Northern Ireland are expected to hit record highs this year after the Chancellor announced an extension of the current stamp duty holiday.
It will save thousands more buyers up to £15,000 in costs. But experts warn it will help push home ownership even further out of the reach of many wannabe first-time buyers.
WHAT EXACTLY DID THE CHANCELLOR ANNOUNCE?
RISHI Sunak has said the stamp duty holiday will be extended until the end of June. That means homebuyers in England and Northern Ireland will pay no stamp duty on properties worth up to £500,000. The extension will save an additional 300,000 home buyers up to £15,000, according to property website Rightmove.
The holiday was introduced in July last year to help bolster the housing market through the pandemic and had been due to end this month.
An extension to the deadline was expected. But the Chancellor also announced that stamp duty will be tapered after the holiday ends. The threshold will drop to £250,000 until the end of September before returning to its normal level of £125,000.
The Scottish equivalent to stamp duty is Land and Business Transaction Tax (LBTT). Last July, the threshold at which buyers had to pay the duty was increased from £145,000 to £250,000, but SNP Finance Secretary Kate Forbes has said the tax relief will stop at the end of this month.
IS IT GOOD NEWS?
THOUSANDS of homebuyers will have breathed a huge sigh of relief. Buying a home is stressful at the best of times, but in recent months the usual strains have been magnified.
The stamp duty holiday created a frenzy of activity, with thousands more buyers than usual competing for conveyancers, surveyors and property checks.
The pandemic has added further strain, with social distancing rules making viewings more complicated and illness creating delays.
Without an extension, thousands of deals would have likely fallen through because buyers could not get a purchase over the line in time.
Brian Murphy, head of lending at Mortgage Advice Bureau, says: ‘Home buyers currently in the process of completing their property transactions can now breathe easy.
‘The extension offers some much needed latitude to the industry as conveyancers have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of transactions – and should help ease the current bottleneck.’
The taper will also avert a cliff edge, softening the blow for buyers who don’t complete by the end of June.
HOW WILL THE MOVE AFFECT HOUSE PRICES?
THE stamp duty holiday has helped push house prices to a record high.
Prices rose by 8.5 per cent last year to £252,000 on average, the highest annual growth rate since October 2014, according to the Office for National Statistics. An extension is likely to push them higher still.
House prices could rise by 5 per cent this year, the Office for Budget Responsibility predicts. That marks a huge turnaround from its November forecast of a 3.5 per cent fall.
CAN NEW HOMEBUYERS MEET THE DEADLINE?
IN theory, yes. The time it takes to sell a property has plunged. The average number of days it takes fell to 49 in November, from 67 a year earlier, according to Rightmove. But obstacles can delay the process.
Fran King, 26, has been waiting more than a month for checks to come back on the home she is buying with her boyfriend in Langdon Hills, Essex. ‘The stamp duty extension is such a relief,’ she says. ‘We were glued to Twitter during the Budget, hoping one would be announced.
‘The market is really crowded so everything is a lot slower.’
Paul Stockwell, chief commercial officer at Gatehouse Bank, believes the extension is likely to entice more people into the market. He warns: ‘Anyone about to embark on a home purchase above £250,000 should budget to pay stamp duty.’
WILL FIRST-TIME BUYERS BENEFIT?
Since November 2017, first-time buyers have not paid any stamp duty on properties costing £300,000 or less. But Jessica Sena, 26, believes the stamp duty holiday is beneficial for many first-time buyers like herself. She and her partner exchanged contracts on a property in Essex just hours after the Chancellor’s announcement.
She says: ‘For anyone buying anywhere near London, £300,000 will not get you very much. The stamp duty holiday will save us £5,000.’
D.M. writes: JSD Group Limited, based in Carlisle, has been coldcalling timeshare owners, telling them they were mis-sold. They have also been cold-calling people like me, who have solar panels. They told me I was a victim of misselling, and they would get me compensation, but I know the company which installed the panels went into liquidation. Anyway, they work well and I was not mis-sold.
JSD Group is barely a year old, but within weeks of opening for business its advertising included some impressive testimonials.
John, from County Down, recovered £28,772 and wrote: ‘I feel absolutely made up that I can send my only grandchild to further education. JSD Group, thank you from the bottom of my heart.’ And Jillian, from Manchester, won compensation of £12,098. She said: ‘God bless you guys, you really listened to everything and the information you highlighted was really helpful for me.’
Because of the work I do to help readers get money back from dodgy companies, I know just how long this can take. The idea that a new company could come along in March of last year, advertise, recruit customers, investigate their claims, gather evidence, submit that evidence to whoever was on the other end of the complaint, and then emerge with huge compensation payments – and do all of this in just a matter of weeks at exactly the moment the country was reeling from the first lockdown – is quite simply unbelievable.
On the timeshare front, JSD has clearly got hold of old lists of people who bought timeshare. One person they contacted was asked to pay £600 up front and was promised a complete refund of the original cost of their timeshare. Even when they explained that they had managed to get rid of the timeshare 20 years ago, JSD still assured them they were entitled to a full refund.
As for solar panels, yours were installed more than ten years ago by Solar Fusion Limited, a Bournemouth company that went into liquidation in 2017. You have no complaints about them, but again, JSD seems to have got hold of a list of the defunct business’s customers.
Some people contacted by JSD Group say they were told it was authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority as a claims management company. This is false. No such name appears in the FCA’s public register of claims firms. I emailed some questions to JSD, and even offered to publish an interview with a happy customer. JSD did not reply. I telephoned, but my call went straight to a voicemail system that told me JSD’s mailbox was full. So, last Monday, I dropped in on JSD at its address in Raffles Avenue in Carlisle.
If I had expected an office full of legal and financial experts helping victims of dubious companies, I would have been disappointed. All I found was an ordinary house, with nobody at home except a barking dog.
As for who is behind JSD, this raises a whole new question. Company records say JSD Group is owned and run by one man, Scott James Deakin. Yet I know that from at least July 21, 2020 onwards, Deakin was not even in Britain. He was in Indonesia, where he was arrested on October 25 for allegedly defrauding a hotel by paying with a dud credit card.
Perhaps he was a front man for whoever is really behind JSD. Perhaps he was not even aware that his name had been used. But he cannot genuinely have been in sole charge of the Carlisle company while at the same time being thousands of miles away for months on end.
Either way, nobody approached by JSD Group should part with a penny. There are far too many unanswered questions for comfort.