A selection of your property queries answered
House in same terrace made more
As executor I am looking after the sale of my late aunt's house. I have no experience in these matters and put it for sale through a local estate agent. He valued it at €380,000 and after some months I now have a "sale agreed on it" for €386,000 and a deposit has been paid. I have since heard that a house in the same terrace and in the exact same condition as my aunt's sold for €410,000. I now strongly feel that I should take the house off the market and start again with a new agent. Can I do that?
Under our present system, in a private treaty sale, both the buyer and the vendor can pull out at any time right up to the moment that the contract of sale is signed - no matter what deposit has been paid. So technically yes, you can pull out of the sale and put the house back on the market with another agent. Before you pull out of the deal you should accept that no two houses are the same. There may be differences such as a bigger garden, planning permission to extend or even a different internal layout. Talk to the agent and get his side of the story and satisfy yourself that the two houses are in fact of similar value.
Will I have to pay CGT on home?
My husband has been offered a caretaker job that comes with accommodation. We own a house and one option would be to keep it as a future pension and to rent it out. I understand that our house then becomes an investment property and if we sell it we will have to pay capital gains tax on it. If we took the option of selling we would prefer to wait a while to see if the job works out. Is there a "grace period" in terms of capital gains of any sort? As the income is quite low in the new job, we are worried that if we sold up now, after a couple of years we would not be able to get back in the property market. So another option is to keep the house and maybe rent a room in it - then the apartment with the job would be my husband's primary residence and the house would remain mine. If we did that, would we escape capital gains tax? Can a married couple have two different primary residences.
The "grace period" you talk about does exist. Basically you have a year to sell your home (or principal private residence) before a CG liability kicks in. A married couple can have only one main residence for both spouses at any one time. There was a question in this column last week about work-related absences from a principal residence and this might apply to you. According to the Revenue, certain periods of absence during which you are prevented from residing in the house are treated as periods of owner-occupation if, both before and after those periods, the house was occupied by you as your only or main residence. These include any period not exceeding four years, or any periods which together do not exceed four years, throughout which you had to reside elsewhere and had no other residence eligible for relief because of your place of work or your conditions of employment. The condition of employment must have been reasonably imposed to secure the effective performance by your husband of his duties. There are other tax implications to your plan such as tax on rental income and benefit-in-kind tax your husband might incur due to the new job providing you with accommodation.
Send your queries to Property Questions, The Irish Times, 10-16 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2 or e-mail propertyquestions@irish-times.ie.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to respond to all questions. The above is a representative sample of queries received. This column is a readers' service and is not intended to replace professional advice. No individual correspondence will be entered into.
