Accountants for landlords planning retirement and succession
You spent decades building a rental portfolio and you are now deciding what happens to it. Selling down, passing property to your children, or moving the portfolio into a structure the family can inherit are three different tax problems, and the order you take them in changes the bill. The routes need setting out in numbers before anything is signed. The shape of the estate comes first: what each property cost, what it is worth now, how it is owned, what is still mortgaged, and whether the estate sits above the point where the residence nil-rate band begins to taper. Only then are disposal timing, gifts and structures compared. Where the estate stands, and the tax attaching to each route, then sits on one page. The documents your accountant prepares for your solicitor follow from it.
What lands on your desk
What you are dealing with
Selling down over several tax years rather than in one
Four disposals in one tax year stack every gain on one income base, push most of it through the 24% higher rate and use a single £3,000 annual exempt amount. Spread over three or four years, each year's exemption is used and part of each gain can fall in the 18% band. Every disposal where tax is due still carries a 60-day return. Size it on the capital gains tax calculator.
Gifting and the seven-year clock
An outright gift to a child is a potentially exempt transfer, free of inheritance tax if you survive seven years. Two things catch landlords out. It is still a disposal at market value for capital gains tax, so tax can fall due on a transfer that raised no cash. And taper relief reduces the tax, not the value. The note on the seven-year clock walks the timing.
Family investment companies and growth shares
You keep preference shares carrying a fixed coupon, the next generation holds growth shares taking future growth, and your estate holds a value that stops rising. The seven-year clock runs from the gift of the growth shares, not from the day the company is formed. Moving property in is a disposal at market value, with no holdover for investment company shares.
Trusts, the entry charge and the ten-year charge
Property into a discretionary trust is a chargeable lifetime transfer, not a potentially exempt one. Inheritance tax of 20% falls at once on value above your available nil-rate band, more if you die within seven years, and the trust faces up to 6% at each ten-year anniversary. Against that, holdover relief is available on the way in where neither you nor your spouse can benefit.
Incorporating late in life, and the uplift on death
Incorporation relief can roll the gain into the shares where the letting activity is genuinely a business, but since 6 April 2026 it must be claimed. Set against that, assets you still hold at death are acquired by your personal representatives at market value, so the lifetime gain is never charged, and transferring now can create a cost that holding would not. The incorporation cost calculator prices the route.
Keeping income in retirement versus passing on capital
Giving away the highest-yielding properties lowers the estate and starves the income at once. A workable plan names which properties are income for life, which are for the family, and which are sold to clear debt.
What a specialist reviews
What a specialist reviews
An estate and portfolio position on paper
A specialist in the partner network works through ownership of every property, original cost and improvement spend, current values, borrowing and how each title is held. That produces the two numbers the plan turns on: the latent gain across the portfolio, and the estate value against the nil-rate bands.
A disposal timetable across tax years
Where selling down is part of the plan, a specialist sets out which properties go in which tax year, the expected cost of each, and where the 60-day deadlines fall. Private residence relief on anything once your home, and spousal no-gain-no-loss transfers before a sale, are checked in advance.
A structure comparison rather than a single answer
Gift, trust and family investment company are modelled side by side: entry cost, filing burden, what happens if you die within seven years, and control retained. Doing nothing is included, and below the allowances it is often cheapest. Where business or agricultural property is in the mix, the business and agricultural relief calculator shows how the £2.5m allowance is used up.
The filings and claims your accountant prepares
Incorporation relief claims, holdover claims, 60-day property returns, self assessment, company accounts, and the inheritance tax forms that follow a death. Wills, articles, shareholders' agreements and deeds of variation are drafted by your solicitor; a specialist supplies the tax position they must reflect and reviews the drafts.
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