My experience moving is that the annoyance cost of moving—prioritization, search, negotiation, moving and changing your stuff, relearning your surroundings, making new friends, dealing with the kids, and so forth—towers over things like real estate commissions, even if you own a relatively expensive house, especially now that the internet is (finally!) driving them down. When recently considering a move, at first I thought the round-trip commission cost was an issue until I realized it was missing a zero versus other concerns.
In the UK, there is a tax payable any time you buy a house, called “stamp duty land tax”. E.g., if you buy a house costing £500,000 then you get taxed £15,000. This is a lot bigger than typical agents’ fees. But this may be a UK idiosyncrasy without parallels anywhere else—I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing in the US, for instance.
In the UK, there is a tax payable any time you buy a house, called “stamp duty land tax”. E.g., if you buy a house costing £500,000 then you get taxed £15,000. This is a lot bigger than typical agents’ fees. But this may be a UK idiosyncrasy without parallels anywhere else—I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing in the US, for instance.
Prop 13 in California has vaguely similar consequences—property taxes are paid annually as a percentage of the assessed value of the property, but Prop 13 limits the assessed value of the property to grow by 2% per year at most, unless the property is sold, at which point the assessed value becomes the sale price. (The annual increase in median home price over that period has been closer to 8%.) Implicitly, this is a tax on selling homes that becomes larger the longer the house has been owned by a single party.
My experience moving is that the annoyance cost of moving—prioritization, search, negotiation, moving and changing your stuff, relearning your surroundings, making new friends, dealing with the kids, and so forth—towers over things like real estate commissions, even if you own a relatively expensive house, especially now that the internet is (finally!) driving them down. When recently considering a move, at first I thought the round-trip commission cost was an issue until I realized it was missing a zero versus other concerns.
In the UK, there is a tax payable any time you buy a house, called “stamp duty land tax”. E.g., if you buy a house costing £500,000 then you get taxed £15,000. This is a lot bigger than typical agents’ fees. But this may be a UK idiosyncrasy without parallels anywhere else—I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing in the US, for instance.
Prop 13 in California has vaguely similar consequences—property taxes are paid annually as a percentage of the assessed value of the property, but Prop 13 limits the assessed value of the property to grow by 2% per year at most, unless the property is sold, at which point the assessed value becomes the sale price. (The annual increase in median home price over that period has been closer to 8%.) Implicitly, this is a tax on selling homes that becomes larger the longer the house has been owned by a single party.