Barratt Mercia axes stamp duty on houses up to £500,000

Date:Wednesday 17th September 2008
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Stamp duty is being scrapped by Barratt Mercia on all properties worth up to £500,000.

In effect, this means every Barratt home in Shrewsbury is exempt from stamp duty.

Chris Ashmore, sales director at Barratt Mercia, said that stamp duty could make the difference between being able to afford to move or not.

The Barratt Group is a homebuilder which completed more than 18,500 places to live from 2007 to 2008.

Its remit includes flats, family homes, urban regeneration and retail shopping centres.

The government's recently widely-reported plan to axe stamp duty for a year for properties worth up to £175,000 was met with mixed responses.

According to the Financial Times, the move could attract professional buy-to-let landlords back into the housing market's lower end over the coming months.

Melanie Bien of Savills Private Finance told the paper that for some professional landlords, it was a "win-win situation".

She explained that they could get discounts on property sales while keeping an extra one per cent from the stamp duty exemption.