I can't wait to get my land tax bill next year. Expecting a figure equivalent to an overseas holiday.
We have a big land tax bill due in a week for property held in a trust. It is a good lesson on getting appropriate advice on setting up how you should hold property. (This was not our doing, but an inherited situation.) We also have our own land tax to pay for our double block.
If we get approval to build townhouses on our double block, we will be putting each townhouse into a separate trust. The two houses will be left in hubby's name on much smaller blocks, and I've estimated that the land tax on the total might still be around what it is now.
With the trust, the options are to pay the stamp duty to transfer one or more houses into different names/trusts, which would only be worthwhile if we hold the properties long enough to recoup the expenses of doing so, or to suck it up and decide whether to sell something, buy something else in another entity, sell a property and buy shares instead, etc.
We have until 30 June 2015 (land tax is calculated on your holdings as at that date) to make a decision on whether we change things. If we do nothing, we get to pay it again next year. I really hurts to pay out so much. i know we are lucky to have the assets, but structured differently, we be so much better off.
My parents chose just one trust for several reasons that made sense at the time, but one of the reasons not to set up more than one trust was the extra cost to manage multiple trusts, cost to do the tax etc. I don't recall any advice back then about land tax being discussed and the option of having one property per trust. (Also, I guess the land value was much less back then, and as it rises, the land tax rises.)
So, when the likes of fullylucky ask questions and ignore the answers, it makes me annoyed. My parents took advice, and the advice was to have more than one trust. Choosing not to do so has proved to have been the wrong way to set things up, but at the time, land tax was not the impost it has become.
There is a lesson there for budding investors.