Saint Louis Real Estate-Tax Credit Vote Delayed!

Here we go again!

After months of speculation, discussion and planning by the legislature and Congress, the much hoped for vote today on extending the First Time Home Buyers Tax Credit has been delayed by the U.S. Senate.

The U.S. Senate won’t vote until next week at the earliest on proposals to extend the tax credit along with a vote on unemployment benefits for the nations jobless.

The Senate’s vote was delayed by a Republican demand that a vote be allowed on an amendment to to end the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program-TARP-at the end of this year. You can read more about this action at Bloomberg.com.

For all of you keeping tabs on what’s happening with the Tax Credit, here’s where we are as of today- a brief outline of the major points:

The credit would be extended until April 30th, 2010. It would include $8000 dollars for first time homebuyers AND $6500 dollars for “move up buyers” (from December 1st, 2009 through April 30, 2010)

Move up buyers would be eligible as long as they have lived in their current home for the last 5 years or more.

The Tax Credit would expire on April 30th, 2010, BUT…if a buyer had a contract as of April 30th, they would still qualify for the credit as long as they closed the transaction within 60 days following April 30th.

Income limits for both classes of qualifying buyers would be $125,000 for single taxpayers and $225,000 for joint taxpayers.

Purchases made in 2010 could be claimed on their 2009 income tax returns.

Home buyers would not have to repay the credit, as long as they lived in the new home for at least 36 months after the purchase date.

The amendmemt also includes provisions for a military waiver, including a provision that the “re-capture” provision would not apply to a member of the Armed Forces, military intellegence or Foreign Service who is on qualified official extended duty. Also, members of the Military who have been deployed overseas for 90 days or more in 2008 or 2009 would have until April 30th, 2011 to claim the home buyer tax credit.

Sounds pretty good to me; now if we can just get everyone “On the Hill” to act on this and get it voted before too long.

Our suspicion is that the Senate is waiting until as close as possible to November 30th to act on this. No one wants to see the activity that the tax credit has produced to date falter now or slow down due to an extended deadline. Whether that would happen or not is a 50-50 debate, but it seems like no one is willing to take that chance.

So for now, we keep telling all our buyer clients that they still need to close their deals before Thanksgiving to make sure they will qualify for the tax credit.

We’ll keep you posted on any other developements as they happen in the next several weeks.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Real Estate News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.