Tale of Two Houses

by Whaleoil on January 26, 2010 · 14 comments

Yes­ter­day I posted the tale of two houses. House A and House B are both shit­ters and only 2 square meters dif­fer­ent in size. Accord­ing the finan­cial genius fis­cal fool at Kiwiblog these build­ings almost always go up in value. Here is where fantasy-land of the finan­cial genius’s fis­cal fool come crash­ing down and also destroys the argu­ment for cap­i­tal gains tax.

House A: Cap­i­tal Value of $345,000,  Made up from Land at $325,000 and Improve­ments (build­ings for the ter­mi­nally stu­pid) of $20,000.

House B: Cap­i­tal Value of $875,000, Made up from Land at $855,000 and Improve­ments (build­ings for the ter­mi­nally stu­pid) of $20,000.

The houses (build­ings) accord­ing to the gov­ern­ment are the same value. The dirt under them how­ever is vastly dif­fer­ent in value. One of these houses is just around the cor­ner from my place and a stones throw (by DPF) from the beach. The other is in Whanga­paroa. The House in How­ick is House B, and is on a street that has houses rang­ing in value from this one to over $4 mil­lion dol­lars.  On this street this is the last shit­ter, over the last five years as oldies popped their clogs and the houses got sold the shit­ters have all uni­formly been bowled. Quite lit­er­ally they weren’t worth any­thing, in other words they were val­ue­less, not going up almost always in value. The land how­ever is where the value is and to pay $1.5 mil­lion for a prop­erty on Marine Parade and then bowl the shit­ter and spend $800,000 on a new house mak­ing the whole pack­age worth about $3 mil­lion is worth it.

So how do you mea­sure cap­i­tal gains in that sce­nario. You have gone from $875,000 to per­haps a lit­tle under $2 mil­lionin the time it takes to build your new man­sion, and the prop­erty doesn’t even look the same. One the num­bers alone the IRD would say that is a cap­i­tal gain, now do you charge that on the realised value or the non-realised value. You can’t do either is how. Too freak­ing hard, and that is but one example.

Far more ratio­nal if you want to be a pinko wealth stealer and try and grab more cash is to have a Stamp Duty on hous­ing trans­ac­tions and match it with the same on shares. If you are a real Pinko then have the Stamp Duty on the Buy and the Sell and pre­tend they are two sep­a­rate transactions.

The Tax Work­ing Group should have been bold, instead they were like Speedo Wel­don skinny dip­ping in the Antarc­tic. What we need is a Tax Work­ing Group made up of advi­sors that have no finan­cial inter­est in scor­ing big gov­ern­ment con­tracts or feath­er­ing their own nest who can take a holis­tic view of our sys­tem and start with a blank piece of paper. The group I would have would be ana­lysts from Hong Kong and Sin­ga­pore and their brief would be design a tax sys­tem that assists in gen­er­at­ing wealth of indi­vid­u­als and Com­pa­nies and rewards hard work. That is it.

But no, what we have are mealy-mouthed plat­i­tudes from dicky-licking, pocket pis­sers try­ing to score con­tracts for their firm or tossers like Speedo Wel­don who wants his shitty lit­tle Exchange to be a mover and shaker in the world instead of a flea on the gnats prover­bial. Wake up New Zealand our econ­omy is round­ing fig­ures com­pared to economies like China and the US and the EU.

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{ 12 comments }

Razork January 25, 2010 at 7:46 pm

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Don’t hold back Whale, what do you really think?Razork

mediatart January 25, 2010 at 7:59 pm

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Its easy to show the dif­fer­ence in total price is not due to cap­i­tal gain. Thats what val­uers are for. The Coun­cil per­mits would show that ‘improve­ments ’ have hap­pened. End of story.
A bit harder would be land that had poor acess or was unsta­ble. Spend $100K on an access strip or expen­sive retain­ing walls and up goes the value.
Its obvi­ous that cap­i­tal gain would be less the cost of improvements.

caleb January 25, 2010 at 8:14 pm

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If the land was worth $855,000 and you build a house (improve­ments) $800,000
and get an RV of 3 mill.
Where is the extra value?

caleb January 25, 2010 at 8:19 pm

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we dont need more taxes and reg­u­la­tion in hous­ing. we have a gst and dont want a land tax.

we need busi­ness and busi­ness invest­ment to be more prof­itable and less risky.

less gov­ern­ment and coun­cil, spend­ing and red tape.

more per­sonal responsibility!

Hagues January 25, 2010 at 9:15 pm

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We don’t need any new taxes. The govt gets far more into its cof­fers than it needs to run the coun­try. National sim­ply need to roll back the unnec­es­sary spend­ing intro­duced by Labour and then give us a few bil­lion dol­lars worth of cuts to the exist­ing taxes.

mediatart January 25, 2010 at 9:38 pm

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Marine Pde How­ick prop­er­ties arent worth more than $1 mill unless they are 2200m2. House and land.

Now Sey­mour Rd And Pleas­ant Pl are a dif­fer­ent mat­ter . One site is worth about $6 mill . The house alone is $2 mill
http://mcc.eaglegis.co.nz/MapViewer.aspx

Christopher Thomson January 26, 2010 at 11:50 am

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Did any­one notice that our liv­ing con­science advo­cated that rather than reduc­ing high tax rates we should be rais­ing tax lev­els on higher earn­ers. Don’t believe me. check out the lat­est stu­pid­ity to come form the mouth of J Minto.

Elijah Lineberry January 26, 2010 at 3:57 pm

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What would be a much bet­ter exer­cise is if house ‘val­ues’ reflected their abil­ity to actu­ally be sold, rather than what a Reg­is­tered Val­uer (with an eye to repeat busi­ness) tells you it is worth because he wants to keep you very, very happy.

Take, for instance, the $855,000 fig­ure; unless you can pro­duce some­one pre­pared to pay that amount of money, say, at 9 o’clock tomor­row morn­ing, the prop­erty value is actu­ally not $855,000 and it is fraud­u­lent to claim it is if such a fig­ure is being used to obtain loans or a Coun­cil rates bill or whatever.

Sinner January 26, 2010 at 5:40 am

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We need far far far less taxes you cunts.

Far far far less.

Zero cor­po­rate tax. Zero FBT. Zero trust tax.

And PAYE at say 33% from the first dol­lar, with a tax-free thresh­old at say 30K – so every man woman and child is eli­gi­ble for PAYE but no-one pays more than 10K*.

With Zero cor­po­rate tax and Zero FBTany­one doing any­thing actu­ally pro­duc­tive can work as a com­pany and pay zero tax for ever. Only losers will be on PAYE.

(*OK for all state ser­vants state school teach­ers, state nurses etc etc etc, 33% PAYE with zero threshold)

Bill No Name January 26, 2010 at 7:45 am

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But Sin­ner

Who would pay for the no hoper low life that lines up at the shop­ping cen­ter food halls every Thursday?

Sinner January 26, 2010 at 12:07 pm

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nobody. they starve. prob­lem goes away after a few months.

who gives a fuck?

Adolf Fiinkensein January 27, 2010 at 6:44 am

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Eli­jah, please keep writ­ing this sort of crap. It con­firms you really are a no brainer. No brains that is. If you knew even a smidgen of val­u­a­tion law you would know val­uers are con­strained to assess only the prices which have been paid by will­ing buy­ers and will­ing sell­ers for a sim­i­lar property.

Your ‘nine o’clock tomor­row’ story goes down as sheer fuck­wit­tery. It’s what was paid last week or last month which goes down in a court of law.

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