New IP Purchase Stucture

The land will also need to be transferring at market value to the trust, so you may be up for some significant cgt on the sale of the land as well as the stamp duty. If you are simply going to transfer the land into the trust and then sell it, there is no benefit in transferring it thru to the trust as it will have just been transferred in at market value anyway, so there will be no gain conceivably in the trust on sale.

Too many people focus on the negative gearing benefits. You are doing this project to make capital gains, so the negative gearing benefits short term in your own names may be meaningless in the bigger picture. Dont forget you dont loose the benefits of the negative gearing in the trust, they are just carried forward and offset against what will hopefully be a sizeable gain in the future.

I hope you are also ontop of the GST implications of the subdivision?

Watch using unit trusts as any cgt discounting benefits may be lost on distribution of the profit out of the trust.

Petria,

Deciding on a structure is very specific to your personal situation and specific to each individual property deal. It is not a one size fits all for everybody, and even may be different for the same person from deal to deal.

When deciding a structure, you have to put together your best guess of what will happen during the life of your project and work out what structure will best suit that situation.

I will say that your idea of holding in your own name and then transferring to the trust after subdivision to sell will be of no benefit to you as discussed earlier.

You really need to be talking to someone about your individual circumstances, what exactly you are expecting to get out of the deal, ie. timeframes, expected profits, family structure as far as who the trust can distribute to etc.

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Cheers,
Craig

You would lose any main residence CGT exemption with the trust, so this may not be ideal if you are buying with the intention to live in part of it.

What you could consider is to buy it in your name jointly with a trust. You would set up a deed of partition so that you each own the same percentage as the final carve up of the block, then when subdivison goes through you could avoid stamp duty (or pay nominal amount) and end up with one block in your name and one block in the trust. CGT would be delayed on this transfer too I think.

Talk to your lawyer

What state is your land in?

see s30 Duties Act
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/da199793/s30.html