Purchasing overseas property in your own name or via a company?

If you own personally any disposal in the future would be taxed at 18%. In addition if you purchase it jointly with your spouse you will both have the annual CGT exemption to offset. Therefore you could for example sell properties over the course of a number of tax years to qualify for a £20K (approximate) exemption per property. The downside is that the rental income would be taxed on you & your spouse personally and if you are higher rate taxpayers would be at the 40% rate. If you used an overseas company it would be classed as UK resident if it's controlled from the UK. As such it would be subject to corporation tax on its profits. Any future disposal would also be subject to corporation tax at 22%+ and there would be no annual exemptions to offset (only indexation relief to provide relief for the effects of inflation). If you're UK resident there could also be a double charge to tax, with a further tax charge on the extraction of the profits. Even if you managed to retain control of the company from overseas such that it was non UK resident there would be anti avoidance provisions to consider. In this case the company would be outside the scope of UK CGT on investment assets, however if you're UK resident and UK domiciled (or are taxedon thearising basis), any gains of the offshore company would be attributed to you/your spouse as the shareholders in any case. Therefore the purchase of the property personally is likely to be preferred, unless there is substantial rental income and any future capital growth is not expected to be significant. In this case the lower corporation tax charges on the rental income, providing cash is retained in the company, would reduce the tax burden. You would however need to retain cash in the company and either extract as a non UK resident or during future tax years of little income to derive any benefit from using the company.