I'm shocked that there is no property tax in the UK. It seems like the only way to ensure land is maximally utilized.
There is also a registration (stamp) tax any time you want to register a property in your name, these start on properties higher than 125K GBP however you would be very hard pressed to find anything beyond a parking space or a storage lot for that low in the UK.
On average when you purchase a property you will pay about 4% of it's value in tax.
So saying that there isn't a property tax in the UK is a bit of a stretch.
This is true of property tax in the US as well. Not directly, perhaps, but renters are most definitely paying the property tax for their landlords.
If you rent via an all inclusive scheme then you are not liable for it personally.
As long as someone is paying the tax and no discounts (single occupancy, benefits etc.) are applied on the tax the council doesn't really care who and how many people live on the property.
One way to verify that not even landlords believe this "pass on the costs" theory is to see what they lobby for. U.K. landlords are adamant in lobbying against any attempt to convert the council-tax system into a property-tax system, and California landlords strongly lobby against any modification to Proposition 13. If it were equivalent either way with all costs just paid by the renters, landlords wouldn't care enough to lobby.
Property tax hits all landlords in an area in roughly equal measure, so it establishes a rental price floor without any of the illegal and impractical forms of collusion. Rental prices below that floor generally do not exist unless some kind of funny business is going on, because few people are willing to operate a business that continuously loses money without some kind of plan for getting it into positive cash flow.
Later on, if property taxes increase by a marginal amount, rental prices may increase by less than that marginal amount, but they will also eventually cause the cheapest rents to exit the market, as the tax increase causes them to cross the boundary of profitability, so further into the future will increase the surviving rents due to contraction in supply, and possibly increase in demand, depending on what the property taxes get spent on.
As such, if you are a land-owner in the US, and own property that rents at above-median rates, it would benefit you to lobby the local government to increase property tax rates, improve the public school system, and invest in public infrastructure. This tends to force out your cheaper competition, who might then sell out to you or convert to condominiums, and attract new tenants willing to pay higher rents. Tax increases come out of your tenants' pockets. But if you are at the cheapest end of the rent scale, you would likely prefer to lobby for zoning and occupancy restrictions, and to keep property taxes low. Your tenants have a hard limit on what they can afford to pay, and so the tax increases come straight out of your pockets. So there are valid reasons for landlords to lobby, both for and against.
To put it another way, a property tax would be paid by the freeholder, not the leaseholder. This wouldn't make much of a difference for renters (as the owner would simply pass the cost on), but for owners of leasehold property it would be a stunning boon (and for freeholders who have sold the lease a disaster).
https://www.gov.uk/council-tax/second-homes-and-empty-proper...
Empty properties are not always exempted. It's up to the council. Sometimes they are, sometimes there's a discount, sometimes there's no discount, sometimes people have to pay extra for empty properties.
It has advantages and disadvantages. In my city, abandoned property often gets saddled with old tax liens and cannot be given away.
Surely this means the land has a negative value, and should get a positive tax, seems silly to have liens that are > than the value of the property.
What state/country do you live in?
Property tax would be taxing the landlord or at worst the leaseholder exclusively.
The amount that a person has to pay depends on the budget of the local council and the banding of the property that the person lives in.
The only real reason why this isn't a direct link is that the banding is not reassessed regularly.
I do know some people who successfully persuaded their local council to move their property to a lower-priced band based upon the alleged fall in property value..
I guess one English equivalent is the "Council Tax".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_Tax
And there are "business rates" for commercial properties.
Now stamp duty, that is something which prevents land in the UK from being optimally utilized.
In this case, maximum utilization means maximum economic output, which is good for GDP and good for the country. It may not be the best for the local society, though. That part is hard to quantify and controversial.
If you have the capital, sitting on low value property can make you a lot of money.
Also, if you are a real estate investor, you can "launder" your profits to avoid taxes. That's why old shopping plazas will degrade until there is only a kung-fu place and a dollar store. It literally has a value sopping up real profits from thriving holdings with paper losses.
Under a system of pure land value taxes, an empty lot downtown would be taxed at the same rate as the highrise next to it, and taxed much higher than an empty lot in the outskirts—a huge incentive to put that empty lot to more productive use.
The proliferation of parking lots is a regulatory/zoning issue.
As old Marx put it, a commodity has two values. A use value, and a exchange value.
In the case of land, usage would mean building on it, farming it, or some such activity.
But even if nothing like that happens, the exchange value remains. Meaning that someone out there is willing to trade you for it.
In a discussion about problems with urban property in the US, an HN thread would decry property tax and wax on about land value tax.