Good day,
Please respond to this enquiry and share it on the Members’ Forum.
I am finding it onerously difficult to obtain competitive and assured taxation advice as a landlord and given our peculiar circumstances, section 21 and so on, I am surprised that you have not put your significant membership resources to work so as to determine for us all, a best approach.
I have enquired previously but simply been referred without justification, to your Tax-Specialist of choice, Rita 4 Rent who I found to be non-committal, that is not prepared to give any assurances regarding their performance beyond claiming to be specialist tax-advisers, while casually asking for £2,500 ‘up-front’ because that is ‘their practice’. A not very attractive ‘suck-it-and-see’.
The market place is in fact proliferated with such Enterprises, ready to make significant charges to commence engagement, while metaphorically drawing breath because ‘everyone’s circumstances are different’, like some opportunist jobbing-builder who knows that because you’ve never seen into a stud wall, it’s like Narnia behind there and he can scare you all he wants, about expensive complications.
I would like to mention two parties for your consideration, both with significant web-presence, those being Less Tax For Landlords and Property 118, now it seems, at odds in their advice. The fee arrangements are typical, an expensive toe-in-the-water with no idea in advance of just how deep it will get. Less Tax For Landlords promote what appears to be a clever scheme involving what they refer to as a Hybrid Structure. This involves a Ltd Co nested with an LLP, a construct that Property 118 used also to promote, but who now in fact caution strongly against it while LTFL offer stout assurances of its legitimacy and tax efficiencies. Both cannot be right.
I would like to ask you which one is and if as is expected, you return with the claim that you (The NRLA) are not qualified to give such advice, I would like to ask you why you have not made it your business to determine these matters. A significant element of your membership, those hmo landlords in particular, is faced with potentially crippling demands, now compounded by fearsome energy costs and there can be no greater requirement of you than to put your back into finding for them a solution, if one exists.
I am obliged to point out that you were very quick in self-aggrandising when your membership leapt by some 15,000 during the last two years. Simple arithmetic says that this boosts your income by well over £1m, a windfall in any view yet you bat vulnerable members away to expensive accountants to pay over and over again for the advice that I charge, you could obtain for them with an investment of what is mere pocket-money from your income (95,000 members @ £75 brings in over £7m a year).
Please advise.
My thanks,
