The revenues position on this is pretty clear, if someone is a beneficial owner of a property and will in effect be paying part of the monthly mortgage repayments then that persons FTB status is important to deciding Stamp Duty Issues.
The announcement of this recently is what caused the hulabaloo about Parents helping children to buy houses.
Keeping one name off the Deeds and writing some sort of separate contract may sound like a way around it, but if that contract had any validity then surely it would be grounds for Revenue to charge the stamp duty.
I suspect that doing this will have some or all of the following results:
1. The Contract will have no validity, the Deeds will determine who actually
owns the house.
2. If the extra party is ever added to the Deeds he/she may be liable for
Capital Aquisitions tax. If it is claimed that he/she paid "rent" to "acquire"
their half of the house then they may be liable for the Stamp Duty that they
should have paid originally.
3. The Revenue may make Stamp Duty "evaders" their next target, when they've
finished with the Insurance Policies they're currently looking at.
As for me...I don't know what I'd do.
The solution is bloody simple, where one partner is a FTB and another isn't, allow half stamp duty to be paid, or a proportion if there are more than 2 buyers. Instead we'll get a couple of years of couples being advised that they can do this and then a big "Bogus First Time Buyer" scandal in about 10 years.
There's no incentive for Revenue to clamp down on it now. They can make a much bigger profit if they let interest and penalties build up for a few years.
-Rd