Flat-rate capital gains tax could help to boost the market

Good news, bad news - and what will landlords do after new CGT rate comes in?, asks Angela Pertusini

WELL, DO YOU want the good news or the bad news? Both come courtesy of separate reports by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and the way in which you interpret them very much depends on whether you want to sell at the moment or you are happy/able to sit the impending "correction" out.

So, first the report that made headline news: RICS's monthly survey of members found that 64.1 per cent more reported a downturn in prices rather than a rise which, nail-bitingly, is the worst figure since 1990 (64.5 per cent at the deepest trough of the last recession).

Obviously this is not great on any level for investors who do not care about opportunities that this may open up for first-time buyers (surprisingly few since mortgage criteria have been tightened) or hard-pressed families being able to move up the ladder (again, debatable if they are unable to sell their current homes).

Even those who might want to negotiate hard on some distress sales may find that the credit crunch deters all those but the most cash-rich of buyers as lenders become ever more sniffy about whom they lend to and how much.

Although there are still an eye-watering 6,200 different mortgages available to buyers in the UK, that figure is only half the number that was available six months ago before the Northern Rock crisis and only two are still offering 100 per cent loans (Nationwide and Abbey). Worst hit, apart from the high loan-to-value market, has been buy-to-let with some lenders pulling virtually all their products.

• It is sobering but, hurrah for the second RICS report which claims that, because there are fewer opportunities for landlords out there, rents are climbing at the fastest rate since, well not 1990, but the autumn of 2005. It also records a moderate fall (6.5 per cent to 4.6 per cent) in the number of landlords selling their properties when a tenant leaves.

Of course, this could be a simple waiting game. Next month, the chancellor Alistair Darling's new flat rate of Capital Gains Tax is introduced.

While some businesses claim that 18 per cent is unfair because it does away with the taper reliefs available when CGT was at 40 per cent, for second-homeowners it is an extremely lucrative move and many agents are expecting a great deal of less lettable properties to arrive after Easter. The likeliest contenders? New-build apartments, I'm afraid, which currently look as if they will become shorthand for the recession in the way that junk bonds did during the last one.

• Perhaps some of the revenue raised by the sale of their properties could be reinvested in the government's "build-to-let" schemes. Keen to find alternative funding routes for its much-heralded affordable housing schemes, it proposes introducing what are ostensibly property funds in which investors can buy shares.

Large property companies would be encouraged to build housing at super-dense levels that could be accessed by students, first-jobbers, keyworkers, and would be professionally managed rather than being run on the ad-hoc basis on which a lot of rental property is cared for in the UK.

I'm not sure that I entirely see the attraction of this scheme other than it removes the hassle from buy-to-let (no shouty conversations with tenants or agents about leaky pipes or strange smells) - certainly, the implication that there is the opportunity for capital growth, flagged up in the Financial Times, seems a trifle optimistic at the moment.

• And, continuing my series in "Are the Super-Rich Unhinged?", news just in suggests that an office with permission to be converted into a penthouse flat overlooking St James's Square (famous for its traditional tailors, gentlemen's clubs and, errr, Prince Charles) has made £115 million (€146 million).

This allegedly makes it not just London's but the world's most expensive flat and gives the impression that the £80 million (€101m) prices of homes such as Candy & Candy's One Hyde Park or Mike Spink's Holland Park mansion were panic sales.