In 2013 the Ramsay case changed property forever. Mrs Ramsay persuaded HMRC that she was “busy” enough to claim capital gains tax rollover relief.
Since then the property industry has ran riot with claims that they are also busy enough.
In short if you are doing 20 hours a week you could be able to roll over the capital gains tax on your properties. This is the easy part. 20 hours is a nice round number. The problem is I think that is quite a lot of time to spend on a portfolio. To be fair if you are doing a lot of the refurbishment works yourself then it could be easy but if you have an established portfolio checking the rents have been paid, organising the annual insurances etc and doing checkins and viewings will need to be done quite slowly to get anywhere near 20 hours a week for all but the largest of portfolios. If you have a lettings manager then the chance of getting anywhere near 20 hours is all but impossible.
Let’s say though you do enough hours though then what else do we need to know? Well for a start the entire property business has to be put in to the company. So that’s every property, every mortgage, all of your associated kit (the laptop you put through the books and all those tools). Everything.
You cannot claim the relief if you leave anything behind so if you don’t want all properties in there you should move them elsewhere before incorporating the properties.