House sales slump 62% after stamp duty deadline
It comes after the changes to the housing market in England and Northern Ireland
House sales slumped by nearly two thirds last month as activity cooled after the end of the full stamp duty holiday, new figures have shown.
HM Revenue and Customs said an estimated 82,110 residential property sales took place in July, down 62% on June’s record levels.
It compares with a frenzied June for Britain’s property market, when HMRC reported 213,120 sales, the highest monthly UK total since the introduction of the statistics in April 2005 and more than double numbers seen a year earlier.
HMRC said that, following last month’s stamp duty deadline, “an expected but noticeable decrease has been observed within provisional July 2021 UK residential transactions statistics”.
In England and Northern Ireland, buyers raced to complete purchases before the temporarily increased “nil rate” band to £500,000 for residential stamp duty land tax (SDLT) ended on June 30.
This relief has since been tapered to £250,000 and the nil rate band is set to revert back to £125,000 on September 30.
But despite the drop off in sales activity last month, the HMRC data showed that purchases were 1.8% higher than in July last year, when activity was still impacted by the near-complete closure of the market from March until mid-May.
Published: by Radio NewsHub