Purchaser asked to reimburse vendor for the remaining LPT, common practice?

[Dee80]

Hi,

Can anyone tell me what is common practice with regards the following:

The house being sold to me means that the vendor is liable for the property tax for 2014.

however I have been informed that what happens is that the purchaser can sometimes be requested to reimburse the vendor for the remaining amount of property tax for the year after they move in to the property so for example if I moved in april I would remiburse the vendor for the remainder of the year as I now own the property.

However as far as I am aware there is no onus on me to have be liable for any property tax to be paid to either revenue or the vendor for the first year of purchase.

Have people heard of this before and is common practice?

Thanks

 

[mf1]

Why should the vendor not recover the LPT from the purchaser? They're not living there once the house is sold. The purchaser is.

In practice, it will be a condition of the Contract that the liability is apportioned. If you don't want to pay, you can argue and see if you can get away with it but, really, I don't think you'll get very far.

mf

 

[Persius]

As mf1 says, it's a condition of the contract. I.e it's not law or written in stone. So any contract conditions are up for negotiation

As I understand it, the standard Law Soceity "general conditions" are included with most contracts for sale of properties. This always had something about apportionment of any charges to the state, but was simply not relevant for house purchases until the LPT was introduced.

You can say to the vendor's solicitor that you don't want to pay any of the property tax for 2014 and ask him to remove that term from the contract. The vendor may or may not agree to this.

I don't think there's any "moral arguement" one way or the other.
E.g. when purchasing a second hand car, there is no expectation that the purchaser will refund the vendor any remaining period of road tax on the car.