Uncertainty over stamp duty holiday triggers pull back from home purchases
Andy Sommerville, Director at Search Acumen, comments on HMRC monthly property transactions for April, showing uncertainty over stamp duty holiday triggering a pull back from home purchases.
Key point from publication:
- UK residential monthly property transactions drop 36% over the last month, down to 117,860 in April from 183,170 March
Andy Sommerville says:
“This latest data shows the fragility of the UK property market. Concerns over whether activity levels will sustain once the stamp duty holiday is wound down are mounting.
“The drop in transactions over the last month has been partly driven by buyers putting home purchases on ice until they had greater clarity over the stamp duty holiday.
“Prospective buyers may have been fearful that starting the transaction process at the beginning of the year would have resulted in them completing after the original March 31 cut off, causing some to pull back.
“Despite this month’s fall in transactions, the market has been running extremely hot since the stamp duty holiday. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the legal sector which is bearing the brunt of sky-rocketing transaction levels, with property professionals working around the clock to get clients’ purchases over the line before the June 30 deadline, when the threshold changes.
“Our research has shown that, as transaction volumes grew in the second half of last year, the average number of transactions processed by law firms had already grown by almost 50%. Today’s figures underscore that conveyancers and property professionals continue to shoulder a heavy burden in order to protect the market from the economic impacts of the pandemic and manage exceptional demand as the property sector looks towards recovery.
“Equipping conveyancers with digital tools and investing in education programmes to improve their technological proficiency will help ease this workload by enabling them to be more efficient. A digital approach to completing due diligence requirements quickly and accurately will make the property industry more resilient to future shocks.”
Kindly shared by Search Acumen
Main photo courtesy of Pixabay
