250K for house + 10k Fixtures and Fittings?

Bluefusion

Our house is on the market for 265k. Its been on the market for 4 weeks and we have had several offers for 250k and 250k+ 5k F&F.

We are holding out for a price between 260-265k as we feel the house is worth it.

I can understand that the stamp duty is an issue, and our buyers are trying to avoid paying the 3% SD.

We have just had a family round who want to put in an offer, and they have suggested that they would like to pay 250k for the house and 10k for fixtures and fittings.

From our point of view this (260k) is a figure we would be happy with, but can we sell 10k in fixtures and fittings?

In our house we have numerous items that potentially we were looking at taking, that we could leave as F&F and we could make up a list worth the 10k, but can we do this?

tifnstav

there's already been alot of suggestions on the bords about this, the inland revenue can look into whether the fixtures etc are actually worth the amount being paid, second hand that is, not what you paid for them initially.
a sofa you bought for £5000 two years ago will not be worth that much now, you would probably have to justify the amount with antiques etc.
there is a risk of being accused of tax evasion and i don't think a criminal record is very money saving!

Ian_W

Good news is you can't be accused of tax evasion - stamp duty is payable by the purchaser so it's your family member who faces any grief over this.

Fixtures and fittings can't now be priced separately for SDLT purposes but furniture can - however as tifnstav says the IR are likely to take a real close look at transactions close to the threshold. Also your purchasers solicitors are going to be wary about allowing their clients to do this - the general guidelines they seem to work to are £1000 - as the lawyers can be in trouble if they allow it to go ahead and it does turn out to be evasion.

If you leave furiture with a genuine objective second hand value of £10K, it shouldn't be a problem BUT your buyers should expect to have justify it to HMR&C. An alternative might be to recognise that going over £250K is going to cost them an extra £5K in duty and split that with them by accepting £257,500.