Housing Associations? Renting then buying questions...

[Gem13]

I'm trying to find out more details for a friend (a single parent with two young children) about schemes where you pay a deposit and your rent is like a mortgage payment. At the end of the day the property would belong to her.

Is this what Housing Associations deal with? She is looking to move to a different area than the one she lived in before or lives in now and is concerned she needs to be a 'local' to qualify.

I presume the local council would be the first port of call but then I wondered if such companies are private or have charity status.

Can anyone enlighten me about the process involved?

Housing associations aren't allowed to sell their properties that is there is no right to buy like council homes for existing tenants, some will operate a shared ownership scheme for new properties, there are also organisations that will do shared ownership on properties outside their 'stock' the open market in other words.

If you look here though you can look for a local HA to see if they run such a scheme. But not all do!

HERE is the specific page you want

You can buy a shared ownership house where you have a mortgage for say 50% of the house and then pay rent on the other 50%. In the future then you can buy more of the house until it is eventually all yours. I have looked in to this before but found that the mortgage payments and rent payments came to more than we could afford.

pie - thanks for your help. I started to look at it before but it was pretty hard going, identifying where to look. Pregnancy brain can't cope with such things. I shall pass on the details to my friend.