Don’t expect to see too many estate agents skipping off to work tomorrow, ready for a flurry of newly duty-exempt buyers at their office doors.

The Government’s promise of a temporary exemption from stamp duty on all homes priced below £175,000 may seem rather generous in the light of last week’s Land Registry data, showing that the average home costs just £178,364.

But as active buyers will well know, in swathes of the most populous parts of the UK, £175,000 will buy little more than a dingy apartment, too small for a growing family and located in a second-choice area. These might be textbook first-time buyer homes, but with the housing market so uncertain, they are also often the second-choice homes that overstretched householders would be well advised to steer clear of, as an unsuitable long-term investment.

The cost of an average property outstrips the government’s £175,000 cut-off by many thousands in Greater London, where the average price is £348,366, according to the Land Registry. Likewise, the value of an average home also hopelessly outstrips that new stamp duty threshold in the South East, the South West and the East of England.

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The temporary reprieve should assist buyers in the North East, North West, Yorkshire and Humberside, West Midlands, East Midlands and Wales, where the average price of a home is above £125,000 (the existing threshold) but below the new one.

But closer examination of Land Registry figures show how randomly the winners — and losers — are spread. Buyers in Darlington, Brigend, Cardiff, Peterborough and Plymouth, and in Cheshire and in Cumbria in particular will be likely to benefit.

But there will be little reprieve in Brighton and Hove, Poole, Reading, Wokingham and York, as well as Oxfordshire, Devon, North Somerset and North Yorkshire.

But in reality those that benefit from the stamp duty holiday will enjoy a cost saving of no more than £1,750. Lenders now routinely demand deposits of 20 per cent, especially from first-time buyers, who they see as a risk. That equates to £25,000 on a £125,000 property — or £35,000 if you are spending £175,000. For buyers in all parts of the UK, it will take more than this short-term stamp duty holiday to entice them back into the market.

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