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In comparison, in Finland the stamp duty is 0% when you buy your first home while you are under 40.

• jorvi 6y ago
  > while you are under 40 This seems such a weird condition to add. Someone who doesn't earn much but saves up over 22 years for a house has to pay stamp duty on his first house, but someone privileged who can buy a house when 30 years old doesn't?
  • luch 6y ago
    I agree, it's better to differentiate based on revenues rather than just age. In my country, if you're poor and if it's the first house you buy, you can ask a 0% tax loan from the government and use it to pay your stamp duty with it.
  • tuukkah 6y ago
    I fully agree. I guess the intention may have been to make people hurry up buying or building while young. One of the major political parties here (Centre Party, the agrarian-liberal party) wants people to live outside of the cities. Finnish cities are so small that it's easy to commute from a place with plenty of cheap land and thus it's possible for most people to buy or build a house there if they want to.
    • piva00 6y ago
      Isn't this the same basic principle that drove American suburbia? Expand the outskirts with building houses on bigger plots of land and empty the city centers. It just seemed to have killed city centers in the US. Granted that Finland has a very different culture (disclaimer: I live in Sweden) and we aren't in the 50s anymore to invest heavily on a car-centric society but incentivising people to move away from city centres can have unpredictable consequences 20-50 years down the line.
• himlion 6y ago
  The Netherlands has just implemented something like this as well, but so far nothing has changed for the better for starters.