"Buyers are rapidly running out of time if they want to complete their purchase before April 2025. If you still haven’t had an offer accepted, the time remaining makes for an incredibly narrow window"
- Gemma Young - Moverly
New insight from Moverly reveals that homebuyers have just weeks left to have an offer accepted if they are to stand a good chance of completing their purchase before the new Stamp Duty Land Tax rules will roll back from £250,000 down to £125,000.
As a result, buyers will pay 2% SDLT for homes priced between £125,001 – £250,000, and 5% between £250,001 – £925,000.
Moverly has calculated that this means the average SDLT bill for a property purchased at England’s current average house price of £309,572 will rise from £2,979 to £5,479 – an increase of £2,500.
As such, buyers are now rushing to complete purchases before the deadline on 31st March 2025. But the bad news is that anyone who has yet to accept an offer is rapidly running out of time if they want to stand a realistic chance of saving themselves £2,500.
Buyers have less than 2 weeks left
Moverly has analysed the time it takes for a house purchase to progress from having an offer accepted through to completion and found that the estimated average is 112 days.
This is because there are a lot of steps to complete between having an offer accepted and finalising the purchase, including mortgage applications, many layers of conveyancing, and exchange of contracts.
Therefore, to beat the SDLT increase deadline, buyers need to have their offer accepted by 10th December 2024 at the very latest.
But even this would be cutting it incredibly fine, so to give themselves a genuinely attainable chance of avoiding having to pay an additional £2,500 in SDLT, buyers ideally need to have an offer accepted sooner.
How to spot a seller or property which could complete before the deadline
When you’re looking on portals you’ll see new fields for Material Information. If these are complete, you’re seeing a property which is getting prepared for the legal process. Those not displaying this information could well take longer to complete as they’re less prepared.
Some sellers go even further than providing Material Information and they complete up-front legal information. This means, that when an offer is made, a lot of the work required to collect legal information has been completed. This can save weeks or months when an offer is completed. Look out for properties listed as Sale Ready or Digitally Sale Ready.
Every piece of information provided here is one less that you have to go looking for yourself and this is why Home Packs are able to reduce the conveyancing timeline by 70%.
Gemma Young, Moverly CEO, comments: “Buyers are rapidly running out of time if they want to complete their purchase before April 2025. If you still haven’t had an offer accepted, the time remaining makes for an incredibly narrow window.
"However, there is hope. The reason it typically takes so long for a purchase to progress from offer accepted through to completion is that the conveyancing process in England is unfathomably elongated with buyers having to frantically rush to gather all of the information they require to make an informed purchasing decision, including Local Authority Searches and surveys.
"But there is a growing push to get sellers and their agents to provide this information up-front, meaning that buyers no longer need to waste time searching for it after their offer has been accepted. This logical evolution of the buying process reduces the buying timeline by as much as 70%.
"It goes without saying that this reduction gives buyers a much greater chance of completing a purchase before the upcoming SDLT deadline and thus avoid paying an additional £2,500.”
