Estate agency to close after director blames ‘anti second homes’ tax
Jane Edwards says demand for second homes in Pembrokeshire has collapsed after the county council tripled council tax for those owning this kind of property.
An off-the-high street estate agency in Wales has closed down after its owner blamed her council’s recent crackdown on second homes as the ‘final nail in the coffin’.
Pembrokeshire Properties, which has been a family-run estate agency since it was incorporated in June 2021, has one director, 66-year-old Jane Edwards and operates in many of the area’s big second homes hotspots including Tenby and Saundersfoot.
Edwards told The Telegraph that demand for properties marketed by her business has ‘plummeted’ after Pembrokeshire County Council recently implemented a policy of charging second homes a 200% council tax premium after it was given powers to do so by the Welsh government.
She says the consequent slump in demand that this precipitated meant there is little appetite among outsiders to buy second homes in this area of Wales.
“We went from selling 60 properties in the 2021-22 financial year to just 10 this year,” she told The Telegraph, revealing that she put in £30,000 of her own money to help keep the company.” Pembrokeshire Properties, which has the website pembrokeshireproperties.co.uk, is to be closed down at the end of this month.
Triple council tax
She added that the policy of effectively tripling council tax for second home owners was not benefitting first time buyers, and that the reduction in the number of properties like this was hitting younger people, who tend to work within the industries that help maintain these properties.
“Pembrokeshire became a ghost town in the 1980s – nobody was coming to the area. It has taken a long time to build it back up,” she told the newspaper.
“It isn’t the locals who spend the money here, it’s the out-of-towners. If they stop coming, I’m worried that the area will just recede back to what it was like before.”
Edwards is not the only one to warn over the council tax increase. Welsh tourism chief Suzy Davies recently said it was not improving the supply of affordable housing, while another estate agent, Neil Evans, warned the change had already sparked a considerable ‘sell off’.
