If you buy a property to let as an investment for, say, £300,000, a reasonable average around here, you’ll pay a whacking £24,000 of stamp duty. If you’re a first time buyer, you pay none. The idea is not, of course to raise more money to fund Brexit, but to ‘cool’ the housing market and help our youngsters get a foot on the housing ladder.
Has it worked? Will it work? The real world answer is that the extra stamp duty will be absorbed into property prices. And that, although we all want to help our kids, none of us actually want to see the value of our own homes fall. Which will stop that particular chicken exiting the egg, I suspect.
