The Stamp Duty Stampede Report

Since lockdown restrictions started to ease in the summer of 2020, thousands of Brits decided to move into a new home and take advantage of the Stamp Duty Holiday introduced by the Government. Unfortunately, as a result, many rushed their home move, which turned out to be extremely expensive. To better understand the impact of Stamp Duty stampede, Moveable commissioned nationally representative data that analysed the sentiments of people moving home this quarter, and how much the stampede to buy has cost movers.

How Many Brits Moved Home in the Last Year?

More than a million people moved home in the last year to try to take advantage of the government’s short-term scheme to remove stamp duty for properties worth less than £500,000. At one level, that saved many of them a great deal of money – up to £15,000 – potentially unlocking bigger and better places to live. However, it also created a red-hot housing market – with rising asking prices and sellers demanding that buyers don’t hang about when completing sales.

The Impact of the Stamp Duty Stampede

Our survey found that 12% of Brits felt they rushed their property transaction due to the stamp-duty holiday. The Government’s new First Homes scheme, which gives first-time buyers discounts of at least 30% on the cost of a home, has likely added fuel to this fire. Hastiness can have serious repercussions when buying a house, leading people to make bad decisions – and 11% of poll respondents admitted having overpaid on goods or services during their move, either because they had to act quickly or didn’t have time to fully work out what the purchasing process entailed.

Finding the Best Deals

A fifth of people failed to shop around for the best deals, from solicitor fees to cleaning services, and 13% of our poll respondents failed to budget sufficiently to cover their costs. This meant they had to borrow extra money to cover these costs – putting themselves at a further financial disadvantage.

Delays Caused by Making Mistakes

21% of people in our survey believed a move had been delayed because of mistakes they made – be it filling out forms incorrectly, or not securing the right removals company in time. As well as making consumers vulnerable to extra costs, such errors risk house moves falling through completely.

Why Rushed House Buying is Costing Consumers

Buying and moving into a new home can be a tricky and confusing process at the best of times, more so in the past year, where the COVID-19 pandemic has made everything more complicated – from sorting out surveys to buying furniture. And whilst stamp-duty holiday has provided a welcome boost to the property market, it has also added more time pressure for people desperately trying to secure their perfect home.

Moving house costs Brits an estimated £8,951 on average. That’s no small sum – and getting things wrong along the way, such as overpaying for storage or misplacing crucial documents, can increase that figure by many thousands.

Overall, it seems that buying a house in Britain is already complicated and time-consuming – 17% said they’d been surprised in some way by the process and, ultimately, lost money as a result. For them, and millions like them, easier and streamlined solutions appear to be badly needed.