{"id":11472,"date":"2018-02-13T16:15:46","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T16:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.buyassociation.co.uk\/?p=11472"},"modified":"2018-02-13T16:15:46","modified_gmt":"2018-02-13T16:15:46","slug":"overseas-registered-companies-33-bn-london-property","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-au\/news\/overseas-registered-companies-33-bn-london-property\/","title":{"rendered":"Overseas registered companies own \u00a333.9bn of London property"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has emerged that of the 97,000 properties in England and Wales held by firms registered abroad, almost half of these are located in London.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A vast amount of the UK’s foreign-owned properties can be found in the capital<\/a>, amounting to \u00a333.9bn, according to the figures analysed by the BBC using data from the Land Registry, with more than 6,000 of these properties situated in Kensington and Chelsea<\/a>. The south-east has \u00a37.2bn worth of residential and commercial properties owned by foreign-registered companies<\/a>, followed by the West Midlands<\/a> and the north-west<\/a> which both possess \u00a33.1bn of this wealth each.<\/p>\n

The figures have made headlines due to the fact that a surprisingly high amount of these properties are owned by companies domiciled in the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, a British Overseas Territory, sparking concerns surrounding tax avoidance. The BVIs are the registered home of 23,000 UK properties, despite having a population of just 30,600.<\/p>\n

More regulation<\/h4>\n

There has been a government crackdown against using offshore companies to own residential property<\/a> in order to avoid paying certain taxes<\/a>, with more loopholes being closed, and Theresa May has also recently agreed to create an accessible register<\/a> of all foreign-owned properties in the UK in order to increase transparency and reduce the amount of ill-gotten money being brought into the country.<\/p>\n

Mark Giddens, of accountants and consultants UHY Hacker Young, said: “Until April 2017, if you weren’t resident in the UK and held a residential property via a company it was not counted as being an asset for UK-based inheritance tax purposes. So having a property through an offshore company meant you escaped inheritance tax.”<\/p>\n

After the BVIs, the channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey own the next highest amounts of property in the UK, with around 21% and 12.5% respectively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has emerged that of the 97,000 properties in England and Wales held by firms registered abroad, almost half of these are located in London. A vast amount of the UK’s foreign-owned properties can be found in the capital, amounting to \u00a333.9bn, according to the figures analysed by the BBC using data from the Land… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":11485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,141,6],"tags":[67,11,341],"class_list":["post-11472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-london","category-overseas-property","category-uk-housing-market","tag-foreign-investment","tag-london","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11472\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buyassociationgroup.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}