Buying out siblings- is stamp duty payable?

DE_612183

user1977 said:

silvercar said:

user1977 said:

DE_612183 said:

Thinking about it - it may be worth looking into buying as two or more separate transactions as the first 250k is free - so it they are treated as two separate transaction you may not pay anything - I don't know enough about the rules though to know if this is correct.

No, that would be a fairly obvious and wide open loophole! You need to declare transactions which are linked (and the tax is based on the aggregate figures).

Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but people often staircase on shared ownership properties, where they buy further shares of the property in stages, so I wouldn’t automatically say that it is a loophole. 

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/sdlt-shared-ownership-property#paying-sdlt-in-stages-first-transaction

Yes, but those are quite specific provisions for shared ownership properties.

You can't just split up the price in a "normal" transaction into tax-free chunks, otherwise that's what everybody would do.

not really - most transactions are one off - you never really buy 25% of a property and then another 25% a few weeks later.

However, in this case the £4-5k Stamp is probably not far off what you'd need to pay for a solicitor and the transactions etc so not worth while - but if the property was a lot bigger I'm not sure what could be done about it - how could prove the transactions were not linked and just two separate ones?

GDB2222

Just a thought - is the property held by executors at the moment?

user1977

DE_612183 said:

user1977 said:

silvercar said:

user1977 said:

DE_612183 said:

Thinking about it - it may be worth looking into buying as two or more separate transactions as the first 250k is free - so it they are treated as two separate transaction you may not pay anything - I don't know enough about the rules though to know if this is correct.

No, that would be a fairly obvious and wide open loophole! You need to declare transactions which are linked (and the tax is based on the aggregate figures).

Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but people often staircase on shared ownership properties, where they buy further shares of the property in stages, so I wouldn’t automatically say that it is a loophole. 

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/sdlt-shared-ownership-property#paying-sdlt-in-stages-first-transaction

Yes, but those are quite specific provisions for shared ownership properties.

You can't just split up the price in a "normal" transaction into tax-free chunks, otherwise that's what everybody would do.

not really - most transactions are one off - you never really buy 25% of a property and then another 25% a few weeks later.

However, in this case the £4-5k Stamp is probably not far off what you'd need to pay for a solicitor and the transactions etc so not worth while - but if the property was a lot bigger I'm not sure what could be done about it - how could prove the transactions were not linked and just two separate ones?

I would have thought it normally reasonably obvious from the circumstances. But in any event, we're not here to give people advice about how to get away with tax evasion...