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housespider

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  1. A few doors down from me paid £460k in 2006 for their house . They put it on the market beginning of last month, I nearly choked on my coffee when I saw how much for. A whopping £795K !! I had seen the For Sale sign, which is why I checked. I had expected to see £575k max. Last week the asking price was reduced to £750K . Could this be a 'new' method being used by Estate Agents. Advertise it for a ridiculous amount, wait a few weeks, reduce it to a lower BUT still ridiculous asking price in the hope that someone somewhere will notice and will think it's now a bargain?
  2. My purchase and that of my in-laws does not come under any of the above. Also, I have since found out that my sister in law, who bought a property about 8 years ago for just under 1 million (part mortgage), that sale does not appear either. Something is obviously amiss.
  3. Thanks for that - not sure I will fill in the form though as quite frankly I don't mind the fact that other people can't easily find out how much I paid for my house. We are in possession of the title deeds, which are supplied by LR so I know that all is well on that front. However it just makes me wonder if the LR figures include all such purchases (cash sales) all of the time.........
  4. Hello - no, both houses were 'normal' purchases bought from the then owners, no probate situation, auction or repo....... Having thought about it, the lady we bought from was mortgage free and it's very likely that it was the same with the house my in-laws bought. There might be something in that fact......
  5. Apologies if this has been asked and answered before but, what do LR do with regards to cash purchases? We bought for cash 4 years ago and my in-laws a year ago and neither of our properties show as having been purchased on any of the free to use sites - only the previous purchase of our properties appear. Do LR include such purchases in their figures regardless of this ? We bought 3 years ago not 4 - not that it should matter.
  6. Brilliant! They should be allowed to keep it. The only thing I don't understand is why didn't they make it 2 bedrooms? They were having a baby and yet only 1 bedroom? hardly thinking long term........
  7. It wasn't quite like that - we were moving area and not being familiar with the new area, we thought; 1. It would be wise to rent for a few months, maximum 1 year, in the new area before buying. 2. we expected that the prices in the new area (more expensive than where we had lived), would fall a bit as prices seemed mental. We ended up having to move area again almost 4 years later to an area we could afford to buy a home in.
  8. It's a pet hate of mine - people who look at houses purely as 'investment' rather than as a home. In fact, when I STR, I made it clear to the EA that I did not want any BTL's coming round. In the four years I spent looking to buy a home, I always only offered what I honestly thought a property was worth, which was always, always a lot less than people happened to be asking for. Probably why it took so long and felt even longer.....
  9. Oh! no!! I'm not laughing anymore! I must have missed that bit. What a d*ck he turned out to be!
  10. It is indeed. However, there is a snag, someone else posted about the very same thing and someone else highlighted the fact that the ' buyer' was in fact looking to buy it as a BTL!!!! I must have missed that bit! I'm not laughing anymore!
  11. [quote name='Tired of Waiting' timestamp='1364069755' post='90928752 Just now on Channel 4, "Sarah Beeny's Selling Houses", in Oxford, the "buyer" decided to put an offer: Asking price: £385k Offer: £305k Brilliant. Finally a buyer with sense! And shown on our telly! And then the buyer says: "I think it's fair value". Well done! Just posted about this myself but I thought the asking price was £375k but £385k makes it even funnier! I would really like to buy that guy a drink!
  12. A chap who was house hunting went and viewed the 3 properties and decided on making an offer on his favourite one and said to the EA showing him around - " I would like to make an offer but not for the asking price of £375k, I would like to offer £305k". I laughed so much, I nearly fell off the sofa! I pressed re-wind twice and might set it up as a loop on my laptop for whenever I need cheering up! Come on, own up - which one of you was it?
  13. Rent £305 per month? were they renting one room in a shared house somewhere where no one else would choose to live?
  14. I'm not too sure where they stick their money but I do know that they are all self serving insincere t*****s!
  15. A house about 12 doors away from me (South East) went on the market on a Thursday about a month ago and was STC on the Friday the following week! It's a victorian semi - 4 bedrooms, similar to mine but a little smaller and is all decorated and done out. When we bought ours in 2010 it needed 'updating'. We paid under £300K for ours and the asking price on the house in question was £395k .
  16. Or even over £8,500 per square m! Hideous price!
  17. Found it! You will need to scroll down to find this specific article though....... Can't do the link thing! You can just copy and paste this...... http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/shirley_porter
  18. Sorry, I left a space where there should be none after the www It's a Freedom of Information Website. Will try to find article within the website again and try to provide a link (if I can work out how to do it)......
  19. It would appear that there are other Land related issues - talk about "learning something new every day" ! I found the following on a web site called - www. whatdotheyknow.com - Am I the only person who had no idea about this? "Two days after the September 11 attacks on America, a retired British civil servant stood up at a discreet symposium in Cambridge and delivered a stark warning: Britain’s secret system of land ownership is open to corruption, money laundering, tax avoidance and "economic crime which is a threat to civilisation" Andrew Edwards, a former deputy secretary to the Treasury and an expert on how the wheels of government and finance work, highlighted a major legal loophole for the Inland Revenue; namely that because the British government has no accurate record of who owns what land in the UK, it can’t determine who should be paying taxes and how much. Land ownership is kept secret in Britain because of the outdated system of "beneficial ownership", which means registered owners of land and property are under no obligation to enter their true names. Quite simply this means land in Britain can be bought and sold without anyone, especially the Inland Revenue, ever knowing who the real purchaser is. Edwards had spelled out his concerns earlier in a 2001 Review he conducted into the Land Registry, the government body that guarantees ownership to registered estates and interests in land for the whole of England and Wales. He wrote: "In these days when economic crime and money laundering have become major issues for the world economy and society, and when property assets are a significant vehicle for holding the proceeds of crime, the fact that the Land Registry neither records on the register or knows who the true owners of property are is becoming harder to defend." This means foreign registered companies based in tax havens can buy and sell land and buildings in Britain without contributing a penny to the British tax-purse, while at the same time receiving taxpayers’ cash when they apply for grants and public subsidies for housing improvements, business ventures, forestry, agricultural and environmental schemes without even identifying who they really are. Although Edwards pointed out that the current system is concealing significant criminal activity, it is mostly being used to the advantage of an elite group of wealthy, law-abiding people who are so rich that they can choose how much tax to pay and to whom. An investigation by the Sunday Herald and the Who Owns Scotland project, the independent land research organisation in Edinburgh, has found that the UK Treasury is losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year in Scotland alone because millions of acres of land are held in offshore trusts or nominee companies that hide the true identity of the owners. We have not mapped the entire country and we have not included urban areas. But, despite the difficulty in getting exact details, we have established that at least 1.1 million acres of the Scottish countryside is owned by offshore companies or nominee companies that can avoid tax payments to the Treasury. Offshore companies are registered in so-called tax havens in "low" or "no tax" jurisdictions in places such as the Cayman Islands and the Dutch Antilles. Not only do these countries charge virtually no tax to companies, they also guarantee the anonymity of ownership. Like Swiss bank accounts, there is no way of finding out the true ownership of a company registered in an offshore tax haven. For land owned by nominee companies, used by large estates such as Buccleuch estate, the system is often used to hide true ownership. In the case of the Buccleuch estate, the largest private land holding in Scotland, 99.7 percent of the shares are owned by Anderson Strathern Nominees Ltd, itself a company with a total of four £1 shares owned by four Edinburgh lawyers which has not traded since incorporation in 1992. In addition, a further 2.5 million acres, or 13.1 percent of Scotland’s 19,068,631 acres, is owned by private trusts. Such trusts allow landowners to avoid by entirely legal means the inheritance tax, stamp duty and capital gains tax that ordinary householders must pay when selling their assets. Without taking into account urban Scotland, the booming property market, and the rest of the UK, we estimate that at least £72 million a year is lost on average to the Treasury in foregone tax through the offshore ownership of rural Scotland. The true figure would be much more if it were possible to survey all of Scotland. For the whole of the UK, the figure almost certainly amounts to billions of pounds of lost revenue. On the basis of research by Who Owns Scotland, offshore companies and trusts are estimated to avoid an annual tax liability of £2m, but that is purely on capital taxes and sales. Tax foregone as a consequence of accountancy practices that move money in and out of the UK in the guise of labyrinthine land, loans and share transactions between parent and UK companies is likely to be upwards of £20 million a year. The most modest estimates of inheritance tax revenue lost through private trusts reveal a total liability to inheritance tax of £1 billion, resulting in an annual capital loss of around £40 million and further £10 million in lost capital taxes. Remarkably, while one small, independent research programme can make accurate estimates of lost tax, the arm of government charged with collecting tax, the Inland Revenue, is at a loss itself when it comes to monitoring the activities of Scotland’s secret landowners. A number of the Inland Revenue’s officials have copied some of the methodology and even the name of Who Owns Scotland project. In the course of defending themselves against a judicial review brought by the al-Fayed brothers, led by Mohamed al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods store in London and a 32,000 acre Highland estate, in Edinburgh in 2002, court papers revealed that the Inland Revenue’s special compliance unit in Edinburgh had set up a project to examine landholdings in Scotland owned by offshore companies. It is understood that the officials from Inland Revenue’s Who Owns Scotland team were concentrating on establishing whether offshore companies were using Scottish land holdings and estates to move millions of pounds in and out of the country without paying tax. When money is held offshore in a tax haven there is no liability, but the moment it comes into the UK it can and should be taxed. The problem facing Inland Revenue is the sheer volume of cash that flows in and out of the UK via complex networks of companies and trusts. We have uncovered companies owning Highland estates based in places such as the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Panama, as well as in tax havens still blacklisted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) including Liechtenstein, Andorra and Liberia. The secret nature of land ownership is also a useful way to "lose" money or put it beyond the reach of the authorities. Take the mysterious case of Dame Shirley Porter and several hundred acres of Sitka spruce in the Highlands. In December 2001, the House of Lords ordered Dame Shirley Porter, the disgraced former leader of Westminster City Council, to pay £27 million in surcharges to the London local authority as a result of a "votes for homes" scam she was found guilty of. The council obtained a court order seizing her assets worldwide. But Dame Shirley claimed she only had assets worth £300,000, which came as something of a surprise given that she was the daughter of Jack Cohen, the founder of the Tesco supermarket chain. In 1991 her share portfolio recorded that she owned £5 million in Tesco shares, and more recently, at the time The Sunday Times Rich List was published, claimed she was worth about £70 million. So what happened to her "disappeared" millions? We may have found some of it. At one time Dame Shirley owned substantial land holdings in Scotland, three lots of land purchased as part of the tax-driven forestry scandal of the early 1980s. In one week in June 1988, all three holdings were sold to Oakum Association Ltd for a total of £620,000. Oakum Association Ltd is a company registered in the British Virgin Islands with a box office address in Geneva, Switzerland. No one knows whether that is a company owned by Dame Shirley or members of her family or whether it is another anonymous land speculator. The plots were sold by Oakum Association Ltd in January, February and June 2002 to a variety of buyers. There is, of course, nothing to link Oakum to Dame Shirley Porter. We will never know whether the Sitka spruce was sold or simply transferred to disguise true ownership until the time came for disposal. A BBC investigation earlier this year also linked Dame Shirley to Whitecoat Investments Ltd and the Sunset Trading Company, both registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. Unable to trace her wealth, Westminster Council have so far only managed to recover £7,000 of the £27 million owed to it by Dame Shirley, and don’t think going down blind financial alleys in the British Virgin Islands is a priority for the council. Back in Scotland, secret land ownership is not on the radar for the Scottish Executive, and the work of establishing who actually owns large parts of Scotland has barely begun. With the passing of the Land Reform Act, which gave communities the opportunity to buy land when it came on the market, many in the Scottish Parliament felt their work was done. In the first flourish of enthusiasm for land reform that accompanied devolution, the Scottish Office, as it then was, established the Land Reform Policy Group to map out progress on the issue. Post devolution, the Eleventh Progress Report on Land Reform, on 5th November 2001, concluded that there was no need to improve information on the ownership of land in Scotland. The study – Ownership of Land Holdings in Rural Scotland - concluded that raising awareness of existing information provision would be more useful than developing a new system, and the demand for information on beneficial ownership, the euphemism for secret offshore ownership and nominee companies, had no clear rationale. Instead it decided to publish a booklet – Sources of Land Ownership Information in Scotland – to publicise existing sources so that those searching for information will be able to find out where it is likely to be held. Anonymous ownership is also no bar to claiming public funding. Lord Sewel, when he was agriculture minister at the old Scottish Office, asked the Forestry Commission to review its policy of giving grant support to companies that did not reveal their true owners. The Forestry Commission awaited the outcome of the Land Reform Policy Group, which concluded that it was not necessary to reveal the ownership of land. So while applicants for the new Scottish Forestry Grants Scheme are required to sign a declaration agreeing that details within the application and contract may be place in the public domain, there is no obligation to name the ultimate beneficiaries whose offshore bank accounts will be capitalised with the public money. While the flow of public money to offshore accounts in places such as the Cayman Islands and even Liberia continues apace, Andrew Edward’s Land Registry Report highlighting massive tax evasion lies gathering dust on the shelves of the renamed Ministry of Constitutional Affairs, rotting slowly like the secret system of land ownership it condemns. In government departments from Whitehall to the Scottish Executive, the meter is running on the millions of pounds lost every year while there is no action taken against the scandalous and entirely legal system of land ownership in Britain."
  20. http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/08072010/389/buy-home-pound-10-000.html What will this company think of selling next?
  21. Here is the article http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/how-long-can-the-housing-market-avoid-a-crash-2014108.html
  22. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7858068/NHS-suffering-devastating-cuts-to-jobs-and-services-warns-BMA.html
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