To buy my housing association home now and not wait for right to buy

[Fulani1989]

I have lived in a housing association home for 6 years. Refurbished houses sell for roughly 130,000. Average semi detached houses in the area sell for over £200,000 as it's not a bad area but my house is on a medium sized (100 houses) council estate which brings down the value.

There's absolutely no way I want to live in this area any longer than I have to. It's okay for now as it's 12 miles from my job.

I have the right to acquire. I requested to know how much the housing association would be willing to sell me the house for. They said it was worth £90,000 and with discount of £9,000 that's £81,000. The reality is that my house is a worth around 110,000-130,000 but HA's tend to under value.

My house is a Council house it was just transferred to a HA 9 years ago. The right to buy is supposed to be extended to HA properties but I've been waiting over a year now and there doesn't seem to be ANY development. I'm starting to believe it's never going to happen.

With the RTB instead I would get a 36% discount and would only pay £57,600! Well, well worth waiting for. I'd be willing to wait a few years to get the discount as the discount gets bigger with each year I'm a tenant.

BUT I don't know if it will ever even happen and I don't want to live in this area indefinitely.

My parents and friends said wait for the Right to buy. But I'm sick of waiting.

Buying my housing association home is my only chance of buying a house. It's the only mortgage any lender is willing to give me because of a less than stellar credit rating from a few years of unemployment.

AIBU to just buy my house now? And just forget the chance of a much better discount?

I find it hilarious how much vitriol is being poured on a working single mother who wants to buy her housing association house, as if she is the very cause of the world's evils.
As someone pointed out up thread, middle class people routinely seem to inherit property worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. I know people whose grandparents died and left them tens of thousands, and they acted like it was their due.
But a woman goes from income support to bringing in a reasonable income ( not amazing- 33k for a household isn't a fortune) and wants to shore up her position she is the reason for the housing crisis.
Let's get a few things clear;
Right to buy in itself is no bad thing. In my area many of the larger older estates are much improved by having a mix of peogle. Without rtb MANY people would never had the option of owning a home. ( no granny's inheritance you see) resulting in many people being stuck where theyou don't want to be. Social mobility is a GOOD thing.
The problem was that the money should have been ploughed back into housing. That's the governments fault not OPS.
Also, please can we get over this idea ( that I only see on MN) that "social" housing is for the destitute. It may have come to that, but council housing was always intended for ordinary working people who maybe couldn't access credit/ mortgages.
In my area it's garden to get a HA tenancy if you are not working. Social housing get is nothe, as many seem to think, a favour bestowed by the benevolent state as an alternative to the workhouse
It's just cheaper rent with secure tenancies. Like we should all be campaigning for.
As OP says, her rent is not massively lower that private ( and here in the wilds of the rest of the country that isn't London this is often the case).
She is lucky but she doesn't have to be grateful, ashamed or move out of her "social" house because she has done what we are supposed to do- get a good job, be self sufficient and not be a drain on the state! It's bloody hard to get to the point of bringing in a reasonable income as a lone parent. A high proportion of children from single parent families are in serious poverty.
I also find it amusing when council tenants get a pasting on MN for being so lucky. Look, it's great to have a secure tenancy, it is, and I wish everyone who needed to could buy cheaper houses, but OP has already said her estate isn't great. I know for a fact that half the enraged splutterers on here would be scared to walk through some of the council estates they are supposedly desperate to live on, and they certainly wouldn't want to bring up their dc on one..
But. This is where we have come to, eh?
It's a bizarre upside down world where people are hurling rotten tomatoes at single parents on council estates because they have a chance at security and millions of us don't.
Campaign for better rent conditions. More housing to be built. Go after developers who get away with the minimum number of affordable housing.
There's no dignity in this game.

It should be if you earn x amount you have to pay market value in rent or move out.

Even if the alternative is leaving the property empty?

I also want to hear about how people advocating forced move out/rent increases when a certain income level is reached plan to prevent ghettoization? Bear in mind that a lot of SH is in estates, not mixed developments. And that there's nothing more likely to increase social problems in an area than by making sure the people living there are all below a certain income.

Seriously why can people accept we dont all live in london i live in a HA house the only criteria for applying for a house in my town is that you have the right to live in the country and have local connections there are no massive waiting lists and i got my house within a few months most people on my estate work.

practical terms the OP is sensible to take the opportunity presented to her. A more sympathetic attitude for those fortunate than herself wouldn't go amiss though, and I think it's the tone of the posts that is grating more than her situation.

This.

However, as an answer to her original question, personally I would buy the house now. Interest rates are very low right now so once it is bought then every payment you make will be knocking off the capital.

Also - you have no guarantee that you will ever get the RTB so you could be waiting years and still not get it.

Also - if the house is really worth c£130k then sooner or later the council will realise this and then that will be the start price so the bigger discount will just get you back to where you started from.

Finally - the political situation is very very strange at the moment. Six months from now we could have a very very right wing prime minister, a very very left wing prime minister or somewhere in the middle. Once you have your house then you are immune to this.

I think she should buy the flat
But to post at this moment in time with what's going on was misguided and showed a lack of her sensitivity

We are so many of us part of this system

People who buy ex LA
People who buy Victorian houses in up and
Coming neighbourhoods
People who invest in second property to Boos their pensions and income

There is no malice in it - but the end of the road means we have a city that poor people cannot afford to live in

Sigh

It's instructive that you say city, there. Because whichever city you're talking about, and I have a sneaking suspicion it begins with L and ends in N, it's not the one OP lives in.

Honestly, this goes back to the point I and others have made: the discussion of SH on MN is too Londoncentric. You cannot apply the metric for the south east to other areas of the country where the housing situation and in particular the SH situation bears no resemblance to it.

All the people having a go at the OP. just leave them be for gods sake. There is no shortage of council houses in my town either and I have the right to buy my house just as my ex husband has the right to buy his flat. His is worth £66k on the open market and if he bought it tomorrow he would pay £22k. Mine is worth £80k and should I buy it it would be £50k. I will one day buy mine and i will not feel guilty at all......my town has built over 200 energy efficient green council/HA properties in the last 2 years ( more than they have sold on) so I refuse to feel guilty for exercising a right that came with my lease/ contract. Plus I love my house, its bloody awesome and my home.

If you are angry about this, write to your MP and the PM.

Honestly, this goes back to the point I and others have made: the discussion of SH on MN is too Londoncentric. You cannot apply the metric for the south east to other areas of the country where the housing situation and in particular the SH situation bears no resemblance to it

Yep, it's ruddy weird. It would be nice to keep that bloody city out of one of these threads when the OP doesn't live anywhere near the place.

i wonder if we live in the same town FP my housing associoation two bed house is probably worth no more then £70,000 i dont think i will buy my house unless things change drastically and i could buy outright plus i have had amortgage and its not all that, however i dont begrudge the OP for buying her house.

you cant gamerchick whenever theres a thread like this it always goes the same way i live in the northwest no where near london but people cant accept its not the same everywhere.

Yep I'm up north as well and they even give council places to single men here

Do it now

As it might not be possible if a different government get in

same here gamerchick theres some flats across from me and sever single men l;ive in them also i was able to turn down a couple of houses we didnt think were suitable and still we got our house within a few months!

But there will still be some people who are reading our posts who won't believe them because yanno London....

The north? What's that? Never heard of it!

I just think, if people are opposed to RTB/RTA on principle, in any circumstances, fair enough. They can make that point without pretending that people taking SH tenancies/purchasing SH in low demand areas has any impact on families in B and Bs in Central London. If all the people forced into substandard private rentals in the south east were willing and able to move to areas like OPs to take up SH there, they would be doing so already.

Even if people didn't know before reading the thread, which I have some sympathy with because our national discourse and policy on housing is very south east centric, it's been spelled out pretty thoroughly. Assuming the rest of the country is like London is what got us the nationally imposed bedroom tax.

£9,000 is nothing

Well if £9k is nothing to you, crack on!

I'm not in London.
I'm in the South West and it's like it in most of my county and in Cornwall where my family live.
The thing that angered me most about the OP is that she doesn't seem grateful at all for any discount, she seems to think that it's her right for living somewhere for a relatively short period of time.

Mmm I don't think anyone's in doubt that the situation you describe is the case in some places, especially in the south. It's just pointless applying that description to a place where things are clearly quite different.

True ! I wouldn't normally be so London centric just social housing is a wee bit sensitive here now

there are single men and women here with it too / but they got it years and years ago

They let anything over the 3rd floor to singles and sharers near me. There is a shortage of 3 bed houses, for sure, but even with the discount I probably couldn't buy one of those as a single parent.
If someone gets rtb round here they tend to still live in the house. You can't sell within ten years anyway, but most buy, add a horrible porch and maybe some stone cladding to show they own it, and stay.
I get that OP doesn't come across sympathetic, as there is a shortage of affordable and secure housing in the UK, but honestly, attacking a working single mum when there are so many other people who really should be getting it in the neck
(the billionaires buying London flats off plan and leaving them empty to make huge profits they pay no tax on spring to mind. .)
But hey, it's Britain in 2017 and we are all well trained to blame those near the bottom not those at the top.

If you don't intend to live in the area for long, what is the need to buy your house? Is it just a way to make a profit by depleting the social housing stock even further?

Snarky comments like these always come from people who if given similar opportunities would grab it with both hands.
Nothing wrong with trying to increase your standard of living.
OP if you want out of the area I'd just buy it now. The deposit for the next house from your current discount and reduced price will help you. Also the council may not undervalue so the difference may not be as large.

They have already stopped RTB in Scotland (though education is free-so swings and roundabouts).

As the thread is a year old, the OP has probably bought it or not by now!

@IfNot is amazing-absolutely spot on

Anyone who looks at cashing in from an opportunity that they got thanks to a system that has helped them when they were vulnerable has dodgy morals, end of. Instead, they should focus at giving back to other vulnerable people the way they received when they were so.

It doesn't cease to amaze me how people expect to be looked after in their moments of need by tax payer, but then think it's ok to benefit in totally selfish ways from that care they received in the first place just because they can so it makes ok. The worse is that they are then proud of it as they seem to believe that they earned the privilege!