Help to Buy Stamp Duty Incentive

Yidwann

Hi Guys,

Just looking for a little advice, my searches online today have been a little in vain. I am about to reserve a new property with RedRow and utilising the Help to Buy scheme. The main problem I had was with the price of the property and unfortunately it going into the 3% stamp duty bracket, finding a house here which doesn't come into this bracket is nigh on impossible.

I pushed forward on the idea on the provisio that RedRow said they would sort out the stamp duty, but at the commit point this morning they claim its against the rules to do this on a HelptoBuy scheme purchase, is this correct? I can't seem to find information regarding it either way.

Cheers
Tom

lord_tyrannus

It was my understand that they couldn't pay stamp duty or solicitors fee's if your using help to buy they can give upgrades to the internals ect but i'm sure I've read that that can't be more than 10% of the value of the house

just in the process of buying a newbuild using help to buy

Yidwann

Ahhh, that would be a deal breaker my end....

lord_tyrannus

Yidwann wrote: »

Ahhh, that would be a deal breaker my end....

We had the same problem with Barrett on a 2 bed flat that was 265k and they wouldn't budge on the price at all. Are you close to the threshold or way over

In the end we had to go further out from London to find a house that was under the threshold

Yidwann

Yeah the price is £280k in Winchester so way over, the other problem is they have over 20 people interested, so there is no real bargaining power from my side it would seem, typical of the market down here. They are going back to the mortgage broker to clarify, but when stamp duty wipes out nearly a third of your deposit you have saved for, does kind of make a mockery of the whole system.

lord_tyrannus

Yidwann wrote: »

Yeah the price is £280k in Winchester so way over, the other problem is they have over 20 people interested, so there is no real bargaining power from my side it would seem, typical of the market down here. They are going back to the mortgage broker to clarify, but when stamp duty wipes out nearly a third of your deposit you have saved for, does kind of make a mockery of the whole system.

we are buying over in Andover, I'd take what they are saying about 20 people interested with a grain of salt. You can always try the tactic of saying another builder has given you a better deal when they chase you!

crisp

awful stealth tax that should be reformed and can be done without losing money yet creating more flexibility in the market.

CluelessFTB_2

Apparently Nationwide are the only lender that will take full stamp duty with HTB.

harrys_dad

Wll you are suffering from the problem that HelptoBuy is artificially inflating another house price bubble, and just putting up prices for you and profits for building firms.

leveller2911

Yidwann wrote: »

when stamp duty wipes out nearly a third of your deposit you have saved for,
does kind of make a mockery of the whole system.

Even bigger mockery is the Government subsidising the private sector housing market......

ethank

Many Help to Buy agents will not allow you to receive any cashback offers (including Stamp Duty) as part of the deal. The guidance is silent, but many have interpreted the guidance as saying it must be paid by the buyer. I am in what was the Catalyst region (Bucks, Berks & Oxon) and we were not allowed Stamp Duty, so the builder discounted the sale by the equivalent amount of the stamp duty.

According to some threads on here, there were some HTB agents that allowed it. The majority of the HTB Agent providers changed on 1/4/14 so expect there to be some change from the process before.

Help to Buy is having a massive impact on whether developers will offer discounts, there are more buyers round here now and they cannot keep up with demand. On the development I am on, the prices have gone up, and there are less deals on offer. The housebuilder does not feel they need to negotiate as much.