Did you know that you can get tax relief when selling your own home? Providing a property has been your residence at some time during your ownership of it, a gain on its disposal will qualify for Principal Private Residence (PPR) relief and be exempt for Capital Gains Tax (CGT) purposes. Even though you may not be living in the property at the time of disposal and may be living in another property as your main residence.
How the relief works is for the time you lived in the property as your residence, the gain attributable to that period is exempt from CGT. However, the relief is extended to include the last 36 months (3 years) of ownership whether you lived in it during that 36 month period or not. This is quite a favourable relief!
What’s more is that for other periods of ownership of the property that you were absent from it, these periods could also qualify for the exemption!
Contact us now to find out if you qualify!
Changes from 6 April 2014
Be sure to act quickly because if you dispose of the property on or after 6 April 2014 the exemption for the last 36 month period is to be halved to a period of only 18 months.
This could be the difference of having some CGT to pay or having none at all!
Historically, it could take as little as 6-8 weeks for a property sale to go through after an offer is accepted however more recently we have seen this timescale increase for many different reasons.
There is still time though to help push your property sale through before 5 April 2014 to take advantage of the more beneficial CGT relief.
If you would like to know more about PPR and whether or not you qualify please do not hesitate to contact Sarah Seavor on 07712 218540 or sarah@seavorchartered.co.uk.