Wendy Peters, 48, is currently in the process of trying to sell her home and move to a slightly larger property in Cwmbran, south Wales.
But she was alarmed at the £20,000 moving cost, which includes a £14,250 transaction tax on a purchase price of £450,000. She said moving costs would be more like £10,000 if she was in England and paying stamp duty.
Ms Peters said: “Land tax and stamp duty really impacts when you can move, where you can move to and more importantly how much you can afford. It makes me wonder how many latent movers there are in the market, put off because of the associated costs.”
Stamp duty affects valuations in England, too. Michael Holden, a chartered surveyor and president of housing body Propertymark, said that the thresholds can “put pressure” on surveyors like him to say a property is overvalued if it is worth just above the threshold.
He added: “Buyers will be thinking about their stamp duty bill and will want to get it under the threshold if they can.
“If a property is worth £251,000, no estate agent would put it on the market for that – they would put it on for just under the threshold. Even if it was worth £260,000, you’d still want to price it below the threshold.”
Six years ago, former Treasury minister Mel Stride admitted in Westminster that evidence suggests the cost of stamp duty is reflected in property values.
Effectively it is a buyer’s and seller’s tax – piling thousands on top of people’s deposits and wiping further thousands off valuations.
Moving home in England will set you back £14,500 on average, according to consumer charity Which? – once other moving fees are taken into account.
With this in mind, an increasing number of homeowners are moving less frequently. The average time people live in their properties rose to 10 years between 2019 and 2022 – up from nine years between 2015 and 2018, according to analysis of Land Registry data by companies Spring and PropAlt.
Buyers are already much more overleveraged compared with their predecessors, before stamp duty is even taken into account.
The housing market is the most expensive market it has been in at least seventy years, according to analysis of deposits required, mortgages, tax and insurance by the Building Society Association.