What happens when you sign up to let your place out?
Does your property go on rental register or something?

My mate just agreed to rent his place out and he said within a week all his utility bills were reset and addressed to ‘the occupier’ without him doing anything.

Generally the reason people do this is:
1. If you're a 40% taxpayer you only get 20% relief on the mortgage interest. The company gets normal Corporation Tax relief on mortgage interest so the tax is much lower.

2. If you don't need access to the rental income straight away, the company can save up profits after paying just 19% tax. You pay tax on dividends only when the profits are distributed. Any money you put into the company to cover the deposit can be repaid to you tax free though.

Note that if you do extract all profits as dividends then the effective rate you pay between corporate and personal tax is (32.5% * 100/81) = 40%. The difference is you've got full relief for mortgage interest.

3. When you sell the property you'd generally sell the company instead. CGT on residential property is 28% but for shares it's 20%.

It only works if you don't already own the property as transfering ownership from personal to company incurs stamp duty which wipes out any tax advantage.

The cost of setting up and running the company, especially for just one property, would offset the tax advantage you get.

Mortgages for ltd companies are a bit harder to come by and might have higher interest rates.

Whether it works for you would depend completely on your numbers.

Estate agents sell the data to various sources and the utility companies buy it as a way of marketing directly to potential new customers. The Royal Mail do the same when you register for mail forwarding. This is all pre GDPR though, so not sure of the current setup. Utility businesses couldn’t care less who is the resident as long as they pass a credit check and pay their bills.

Thanks all. A lot to think about. Will need to run the numbers and see what makes sense.

They can do that, and giving a deadline could give you certainty if you are prepared to walk away. If they know you are chain free they may feel any deadline is a bit artificial. The EA will probably te them they have the highest offers they can get after X amount of advertising but some people are stubborn or want a certain figure.

Main thing is that when an offer is accepted they agree it is no longer marketed. You can't really blame them for wanting the maximum, at same time you should/can view and offer on others. If there is work to be done you may will want a survey and this could be a way to reduce agreed price later in the process.

That's pretty poor. I think they are legally required to put any offers to the vendor?

This

Estate Agents are cunts, with very few exceptions

I think because the estate agent is acting on behalf of a business, who seem to have quite a number of properties on their books (Godbless Companies House) - so they are not in any real rush.

Had this been an 'individiual to individual' transaction, this would be much smoother and quicker.