Staircasing to 100% now, later or not?

[Humhallelujah]

I wasn’t sure where to put this, but hopefully someone can advise as we just have no clue tbh. We originally bought 45% of a shared ownership property to get onto the housing ladder 3 years ago due to not having a large deposit.

Since then our salaries have gone up, and now it’s time to remortgage. We purchased our shares in the original property which was originally worth £350k, and it’s now been valued at £390k. Our mortgage advisor has said we could now apply for a mortgage for the full amount, and staircase up to 100% ownership - which is excellent, except due to interest rates we’d be looking at a monthly mortgage payment of £1900pm, which is a £600 increase on what we’re paying now for rent and mortgage.

We could stretch to it, but we’d lose 90% of our spare income, which feels slightly risky as nobody knows how stable their job is. Is there any benefit to staircasing to 100% now, or could we go into another 3 year fix on our current ownership and staircase to 100% in 3 years time when we will hopefully have higher salaries again? OR do we leave the shares as they are, as it will be easier to resell it eventually as a shared ownership property? We live on the south coast in case matters at all.

I feel totally clueless when it comes to this - we don’t intend on moving anywhere else for at least 5 more years.

In our experience, we have chosen not to staircase at all. We wouldn't have been able to afford to go to 100%, and we feel that it's better not to staircase at all than go say to 75%, in order to keep the widest pool available for resale. Ie, a new buyer would probably avoid a bigger share as less affordable for starting out.

This has worked twice for us, and we're just about to move out into full ownership, God willing. Shared ownership has been such a benefit for us to build up equity. We wouldn't have been able to buy x house otherwise

Thank you @Signoritawhocansway! That’s what’s nagging at me, I think we’d find it easier to sell at the lower shares, especially as the area we are in is a lot of young families near a primary school.

Same as the above poster, we decided against it to keep the shares at 30% to make it affordable for new buyers.

I totally agree with you on this and your reasoning - I wouldn’t go over 65% on shared ownership ,’ unless ‘ it’s in an incredibly desirable location, you doubt you will ever move and ideally a house rather than a flat - you limit your potential buying market hugely and unless the above applies , plenty buying at 100% won’t pick a mainly shared ownership development asa priority