The boss of a family-run estate agent says some home buyers and renters are becoming abusive because they can’t get the property they want.
Maurice Kilbride, who runs his Cheadle-based business under his own name, took to Twitter to voice his concern over aggressive customers in the face of the booming property market.
“We know that there isn’t enough housing stock available to satisfy demand,” he said. “It’s been like that for decades, but it’s particularly bad at the moment, because of the stamp duty holiday.
“There hasn’t been enough homes built for a very long time. It’s just a shame when they take it out on us, because it’s not our fault.”
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Why are some people so angry and confrontational?”, he said. “The abuse I had off somebody this morning when I told them a property had gone and unfortunately was no longer available for viewing was quite unpleasant and totally unnecessary. It makes me very sad.”
However, Mr Kilbride did not want elaborate on the nature of the ‘confrontation’ when he spoke to the Manchester Evening News, saying: “I’d rather leave it where it is.”
Reduced rates of Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) applied for residential properties bought from July 8, 2020 until June 30 2021 and from July 2021 1, to September 30 2021 , causing a spike in property prices, some experts say.
However, a report from think tank The Resolution Foundation says the stamp duty holiday has not been the sole cause of rising property prices.
In fact, the Foundation says the tax holiday was ‘wasteful’ and HMRC lost out on about £4.4bn of taxes in England and Northern Ireland as a result.
It says prices will keep rising because of pandemic-related factors like low interest rates and changing home preferences.
“It is reasonable to expect at least part of the savings from any transaction tax holiday to be capitalised into house prices,” the report’s authors, Lindsay Judge, Krishan Shah and Felicia Odamtten said.
“But logically, if the cuts to transaction taxes have been the overwhelming driver of the house price trends observed over the past 12 months, we would expect to see higher growth in areas where the savings from the change in policy have been most significant as a share of the house price.”
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They said the assertion that housing prices have risen mainly because of tax holidays was ‘somewhat wide of the mark’.
The Foundation says similar house price rises occurred in the US, France, Germany, Canada and Australia without the tax holiday.
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