HOME, DEAR HOME
`HOW an estate agent played the property game', beckoned the front cover of last week's Sunday Telegraph colour magazine. And around the rather unenticing features of Mr George Tremlett, former leader of the Conservatives at the GLC, were a series of spiralling property prices — his property prices. But here's a funny thing. After a series of purchases, sales and redevelopments Mr Tremlett now has a house worth £400,000. If he had stayed put in the house he bought in 1968, he would have a property worth £335,000, plus all the money he spent on builders, landscap- ers and, indeed, estate agents. The satis- fying moral is that it may make best financial sense to treat a property as a permanent home, and not as some liquid financial asset, to be traded like a stock or bond. It would be interesting to know exactly how much Mr Tremlett did pay for all his refurbishment of five properties. For if all home improvement costs (probably the bulk of the black market) were debited from the figures given of house price appreciation, it would be surprising if house prices over the past 20 years had done much better than keep pace with inflation. But the real key to the public obsession with property speculation is the fact that, on the main residence at least, it is tax free. It is absurd that the only way in which a person will suffer a tax on his home is if he leaves it to his children, when it is subject to death duties. The Government should truly encourage home ownership, not house trading.
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