Hi everyone,

We are hoping to move to Vancouver this summer and are trying to decide whether to rent out our UK house or sell up. I would like to throw caution to the wind sell everything we own and get on the plane, my OH ever cautious would like to keep hold of the house here and rent it out just in case we want to come back.

Does anybody have a rental back in the UK, is it easy to manage? Do you have to pay tax on the rental income just to the UK or Canada as well?

Hi. We are selling our house in UK and buying an investment property (smaller) in case we came back. We are going to use an estate agent to manage it for us. I think it is not good to break all the bridges behind you in case. This is my humble opinion! Good luck anyway

See here: http://britishexpats.com/wiki/Tax_on...me_from_Canada

If you file an NRL1 then the profit you make is tax free in the UK if it is less than your combined personal allowances.

It is taxable in Canada.

I would strongly advice against selling your house in the UK, simply rent it. Once you have lived in Vancouver for a year or two and you like it then on only then sell your UK house.

I have also done the same and have been here in Vancouver for about 18 months and have settled down for the most part and plan to complete our 1095 days of residency. We will then decide where we want to live.

Also one thing to keep in mind is our UK Pound has lost a fair bit of value against the CAD$ and will not go far enough to buy a property outright unless you buy an apartment and even these cost above £250k for a 2bed 900-1000sqft.

Don't worry too much about the tax on the rent, if your house is in joint names you will be able to split the rental income approx £12,000/year and you can use income to pay your rent in Canada.

Good luck with your move, depending on the type of profession try and do your research and arrange employment before arriving.

Just to play Devil's Advocate to capillano, we've no intention of renting our house in the UK when we leave. The thought of dealing with the tax implications gives us a headache, and we're a pretty bright couple. We have a few reasons for not being interested in renting our house - the worry about what the tenants are up to; is the agent doing their job properly?; what happens if something major or structural needs doing to it, who'll look after that if we're in Canada?; as for the "what if we want to come back" question, our personal feeling is that if we keep a house in the UK, the temptation to give up if the going gets tough will be that much stronger. If we have no house to come back to, we're less like to give up and return, we'll tough it out as much as we can. If we really can't cope, we'll just cross that bridge that we burnt when we come to it.

We'll have enough stress as it is with moving away without worrying about our house in the UK, and making sure we're not bending any tax rules. We're juming in with both feet and that's that. I sense our approach will be frowned upon by many on here, but if we worried about other people's opinions, we'd never take any risks.

Each to their own, but I can't wait to sell up, and don't really give a toss about the exchange rate. Yeah, it's crap at the moment, but I'm not waiting for it to get back to 2.20 before we move.
What will be will be.

As previously mentioned, complete an NRL1.

You will pay 10-15% (inc vat) to an agent to manage (and they will be next to useless).

You will pay for an energy effy cert

You will pay for an annual gas-safety cert

There will be reasonable wear & tear - boilers fail etc

There may be empty periods before and between tenants

You can deduct these costs plus mortgage interest to come to a profit number - if this is below your annual personal allowance limit in the UK then you will pay no UK tax - the profit gets added to your income in Canada for the purpose of income tax.

Be aware of Capital Gains Tax - in the UK you have 3 years letting your ex-principle private residence before you become liable for capital gains tax on any profit (increase) on the sale value of your house (there are some allowances). I am not sure about the CGT exposure in Canada but be aware you could expose yourself to a CGT even earlier.

I let property in the UK, its not all bad but certainly no gravy train.

Thanks everyone, there's certainly a lot to be thinking about.

I've just spoken to friend of mine who an expat in Atlanta she's rented her flat in the UK and had nothing but trouble with it, the most recent of which was a fire in the Garage.

Who knows what we'll end up doing, if we do sell we certainly won't be exchanging the money anytime soon!

This is the situation we are wondering about. We have our house which we could rent. After fees, mortgage etc. we'd come out with about £200 a month. This may be complicated by the fact we may be in the US for a few years before we head to Canada (we are landing on the 25th March), so potentially we'll be filling in tax returns in 3 countries!

If we sell the house, we don't want to move the money to the US or Canada at the moment because of the exchange rate. Since we applied for our visa's last year we've lost CAD120k in buying power due to the exchange rate. We've got positives in our local area here in London (overground due to open here soon) so maybe hanging on will be a better investment, but we don't want the market in Vancouver to price us out.