Developer paying stamp duty

JQ.

What is happening to the £1,000 contribution to your solicitors fees? Should they not be deducting those from your purchase price? I don't know how these things work in practice, but I would certainly not be happy with the person I am buying a house off handing £1,000 to my solicitors - that would appear to create a rather large conflict of interest to me. I'd much rather have £1k knocked off the purchase price and pay all the solicitors costs myself.

SilverSix

JQ. wrote: »

What is happening to the £1,000 contribution to your solicitors fees? Should they not be deducting those from your purchase price? I don't know how these things work in practice, but I would certainly not be happy with the person I am buying a house off handing £1,000 to my solicitors - that would appear to create a rather large conflict of interest to me. I'd much rather have £1k knocked off the purchase price and pay all the solicitors costs myself.

As far as I am aware I have £1000 'credit' effectively with the solictors and will only be billed for anything over this.

The fees will come to around £1100/1200 from their pricing ( I don't happen to have it on me) so I wouldn't save anything by paying them directly and having the price reduced by £1k. So I wouldn't save anything (if other solicitors prices were similar) money would just be changing hands differently.

If anything having a higher recorded purchase price could prove beneficial to me when selling as 'The house cost me £260,000 (of which £1000 was actually solicitors fees)' so when negotiating the first £1,000 I was to drop by is actually a loss on the fees I paid rather than the price of the house. Does that make any sense?

OT:

She said that the detached builds had sold for about £260,000 net which means to a buyer they will have paid around £268/269,000 on an original list price of £275,000. So with mine being a semi, yet completely the same size both inside, the garden and the garage as a detached, has cost me £8000/9000 less.

For the size of the property, the fact that it's a 4 bed semi looking out onto some nice fields and away from any HA builds and considering what other properties have been selling for in the area I'm happy with the purchase price. I was just trying my luck to see if a further reduction could be had which unfortunatley it can't though I've still saved £23,800 which isn't anything to frown about.

JQ.

Sorry, to clarrify my point about the solicitor.

The solicitor is meant to be an idependant expert with your best interests at heart, doing everything in their power to make sure the developer does not "pull-a-fast-one" and to ensure you're not taking on any liabilities or issues with the property. From my point of view I'd be very concerned that my expert is actually being paid by the person they are meant to be protecting me from.

I'm sure it will all be fine as the solicitor has a professional responsibility to you. I just didn't realise things like this went on. There's no way I'd accept legal advice from someone being paid for by the person I'm buying off.

If you're still at the negotiating stage can't you swap solicitors. £1,200 sounds like alot of money for just a purchase of a newbuild, in the past I've paid that for both a sale and a purchase. However, I'm quite out of touch on these matters so I may be completely wrong.

Perelandra

"Normally" if you buy a house for £260k, you need to pay £260k + stamp duty.

So I would imagine in this case, if they're paying the stamp duty for you, that you'll be paying them £252k (or so), but you'll still need to pay £8k (or so) stamp duty to HMRC- taking the total to the original £260k. This would still be £8k (roughly) cheaper than if you'd bought a house without the "stamp duty incentive".