A recently-released Council of Mortgage Lenders’ (CML) research has noted that with the temporary stamp duty holiday on properties valued between £125,000 and £175,000 coming to an end on 1 January 2010, first-time buyers in Northern Ireland will again make a 1-percent tax payment on homes valuing over £125,000.

The CML report revealed that the 2009 third quarter had brought an exemption of more than two-thirds, or 69 percent, of house purchase mortgage transactions in the province, as against a mere
26.3 percent exemption in the same quarter of 2008, prior to the temporary enforcement of the stamp duty holiday.

As per the CML calculations, 132,500 mortgage-funded house sales were exempted from the stamp duty in the past year, thereby implying that as many as 27 percent of all the house purchases coming through since the exemption escaped the 1 percent tax that the buyers would otherwise have paid.

The report by CML further revealed that almost 25 percent of the buyers living in the South East of England, but outside London, happened to take the maximum advantage of the ‘tax break,’ followed by the South West of England.

With no likelihood of the tax being abolished altogether, CML said that the best option would be “a move to a graduated structure would be an improvement on the current system, even if done on a cost-neutral basis.”