As I have lamented before in this column, we landladies don’t seem to be the most popular of people these days. Scarcely a week passes without us being accused of distorting the housing market or preventing first-time buyers from getting a foot on the first rung of the ladder.

Which makes it all the more surprising that Alistair Darling, the chancellor, appears to have written us all a rather large cheque in his prebudget report last week.

Most of the initial attention was focused on the changes that Darling announced on inheritance tax. These will, of course, allow us to pass on to our children far more of the enormous profits we have made from our buytolets when we depart for the hereafter. Of more immediate significance, however, to those who own one or more investment properties, is what the chancellor plans to do about capital-gains tax.

At the moment, when you come to sell your investment property, you could pay as much as 40% of the profits to the taxman. Thanks to what is known as “taper relief”, this can eventually fall to the equivalent of 24% (if you are a higher-rate taxpayer) or 12% (if you pay tax at the basic rate), but only if you keep the place for 10 years or more. All very annoying.

Background

• Tales of a landlady: Tax reforms

• Into the sunset

Background

• Tales of a landlady: Degrees of success

• Tales of a landlady: It pays to shop around

• Tales of a landlady: Residents only

• The ties that bind

• How low can you go?

Background

• Tales of a landlady: Avoiding the agents

• Tales of a landlady: In the dock

• Tales of a landlady: the age of reason

• Tales of a landlady: Heroes and villains

• Tales of a landlady: High maintenance

Background

• Back to the ’burbs

• A waste of energy?

• Tenants like gardens, but not tending them

• In the doghouse

• Parking mad

It’s eviction time

Can investors profit from the rise in repossessions?

• It’s eviction time

Background

• Do property workshops work?

• A letting gamble

• Spread betting

• When buy-to-let turns from a hobby into a living

Tales of a landlady: Persistent complaint

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Background

• Landlords: halo or horns?

• Bidding wars

• Time to quit the ring?

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Enter our hero, Darling (or should that be our darling hero?). From next April, taper relief, in all its complexity, will be abolished and replaced by a flat rate of 18% on all capital gains. Investors, especially those who tend to hold on to their properties for a relatively short time before selling them, are delighted.

“Blimey,” says Robin Curtis, director of Windmill Residential, who owns 15 of his own properties and manages 70 others. “This news is – frankly – unbelievable. I feel like selling everything fast, in case Darling changes his mind.”

Having got into the swim of the 10-year taper-relief stranglehold, Curtis was rather astonished to suddenly find himself without it. “My strategy was always to be long-term anyway, and part of the bonus of doing that was that the longer you waited, the less tax you would pay,” he adds.

“It was like a sort of prize at the end of a decade. I think this reform will make it much more tempting for people to sell up and use the equity elsewhere. I think it will also make it far easier to trade properties.

“I suspect the main beneficiaries will be career landlords who only ever bought to rent out, not landlords who are renting out former homes.” (The point being, if you rent out your former home, that property is exempt from CGT if you sell within three years.)

Justin Urquhart Stewart, director of Seven Investment Management, is also impressed – if surprised. “It goes quite against what the chancellor originally said about long-term saving and investment,” he says. “Landlords will be keen to churn their portfolios, rather than hold onto it, and very happy with paying a lower level of CGT as they do so.”

So, what about those who have just sold and are waiting for the tax bill? “I suspect the tax will be due on the contract, rather than when you are due to pay it,” Urquhart Stewart adds. “But that will come out later, when the details of this reform emerge.”

Sounds too good to be true? Well, there will, of course, be some losers. Businesses, which hitherto paid just 10% tax on their gains, will have to pay 18%. That also goes for the people who bought holiday homes to rent out short-term who benefited from the old regime. Standard-rate taxpayers who hold a property for more than four years before selling will also be marginally worse off. Indeed, initial reports suggested the changes would raise the government £350m in the next financial year.

More important, perhaps, is what Darling didn’t do. Among the proposals floating around in the run-up to his statement was one from the Institute of Directors (IoD), suggesting investors should no longer be allowed to offset the cost of the interest on their mortgages against rental income.

The IoD argued that the tax break distorts the economy by making it more attractive to invest in property than in financial assets. For landlords, the concession, worth an estimated £1.9 billion a year, is one of the main perks of the game. “It would have utterly screwed the market up and acted as a huge disincentive for anyone to come in,” says Marcus Locke, a professional landlord with more than 60 rental properties in south London.

The mass sell-up it would have provoked might also have pushed the property market, which has been wobbling in the past few weeks, over the edge – something Darling would understandably have been keen to avoid.

So, what does it all mean for property? “Basically, it’s fantastic,” says Brian Styring, who owns 17 properties in the West Midlands. “It could breathe some life into the market. People who were put off going into buy-to-let might be encouraged.”

Although there are still those scary interest rates and high prices to negotiate, surely? “Agreed. You have to buy before you make a profit,” Styring says. Something that, amid the heady post-Darling-speech euphoria, should not be forgotten.

buytolet@sunday-times.co.uk

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