Shared Oenership - Any advice?

[Yvemen]

Hello All,

I'm just in need of a little advice about shared ownership.

My partner and I are currently renting a 1bed in South East London with a 1year old! We are hoping to move by the end of this year, but cannot afford to buy outright yet so our two options are to go down the Shared Ownership route or to continue renting.

Has anybody down shared ownership before? Is it really much better than renting?

One of our reasons that we are considering renting is that the homes available for private rent are more often in the catchment of good schools and the new build developments seem to miss it. Also some of the SO homes are built over land that was derelict so the are kind of starting a new area from scratch so you can't have a good idea of how nice the area actually is to live in.

One of our major cons about renting though is we won't really be able to make major changes to make it feel like our home!

Any advice will be much appreciated.

Thanks ☺️

The main huge advantage IMO of SO over renting, is that you are not going to have a landlord suddenly telling you s/he has decided to sell, and you have to go through the whole expensive hassle of finding somewhere else to live.

A dd's bf has a SO house he part-bought quite a long time ago. He is now in a position to buy the remainder and would like to sell, but there are I gather certain restrictions that wouldn't apply with whole 'ownership' (or to be more accurate, usually more like renting from the bank!)
However it has apparently worked fine for him.

DS has just brought SO. About £200pcm cheaper than renting and as previous person said much more secure. And yes, you can treat it as your own - put shelves up, decorate, change carpets, kitchens whatever.

She brought a newbuild and as well as being really energy efficient (cheaper bills), the HA had added a shed, garden turf and some other upgrades 100% private buyers on the estate wont have.

There are a few restrictions about selling (have to advertise it with them before an EA, have to pay a fee), but not too bad.

IMO as long as you intend to stay 2+ years and can resell its a very good idea

I found it is expensive to upscale but didn't get market value when I sold back to them-despite an 'unbiased' surveyor that you pay for.
Selling was a nightmare as you do all viewings and they sent round people who couldn't get a mortgage so was really frustrating. It was ok but if you can do without then it is good-I paid off £20k of mtge that would have gone on rent. I found the ha staff completely clueless.

we found it a bit of a nightmare tbh we were young! We bought and then the market crashed, we needed to sell but couldn't due to the massive negative equity and weren't allowed to rent it out not even short term. So we had a house we couldn't live in, couldn't sell, or rent out. The HA were useless there was a lot of onus on us to keep the property to a certain standard, had to pay a maintenance fee for apparently no reason and the whole contract is weighed in the favour of the HA. Luckily we came into some money so we bought the rest of it it took 10 years for the house prices to increase enough for us to get the money we paid back. I think I wish we had rented, saved and waited a bit longer. I t caused us huge amounts of stress.
Maybe we were just unlucky though.

We are in a SO property, we are planning on staircasing in 4 years and buy the rest.

We found it easy and well managed, however this is our forever home as it's a rural location and big. We wouldn't have bought SO if we were looking to climb the ladder

Thanks guys for the feedback.

The fact it would be a little cheaper and you could decorate is I guess the big big Pro. But this home probably wouldn't be our forever home. We'd likely move on to a bigger family home at some stage in the future (let's say 5 years or so).

The really offputting thing about SO is the difficulty of selling the property and he fact you can't let it if you want to move on! One really interesting thing I heard from a friend is that a SO new build is a bit like a new car from the dealership, as soon as you buy it you taken off loads of the value straight away so you are more likely to get into negative equity quicker.

I'm having a real debate in my head of trying to find a long let and just continue saving for our forever home and buy traditionally or get on the ladder with SO and take the risk!!! GAHHHH 😖😖

S/O seem to sell very very quickly and there is very good reasons it can not be let out. It is home ownership for those who can't buy out right not a way to make a profit from renting it out.

Why do you think there will be difficulty selling the property? Someone above said they had to sell back to the HA - that seems limiting and you are at their mercy at what price. But DS's agreement doesnt say that. She has to allow HA to advertise it for sale on their website for 3 weeks (most apparently sell during this time to people on waiting lists). If theyve not sold it, then it can be sold as a normal sale through an EA (of your choice). Youd need to check HA rules as it seems they differ.

As to resale problems because of desirability, just like any other house purchase youd have to do your research initially as to the location, the price.

IME buying a new build does mean paying a premium compared to comparable older homes, but IMO thats justified as everything is new and fully working. Perhaps if you were to sell within a year while newbuilds on the same estate were still available you wouldnt get the same price (people would rather have the brand spanking new one for the same money), but 2+ years later I havent seen that prices have fallen.

Buying for the first time is stressful and feels a huge risk, SO makes it more complicated - but I genuinely believe buying a good house in a good location is much better than renting.

It was a great first step on the property ladder for us. The only downside was that by the time we wanted to buy the other half from the HA, we couldn't afford it as the value had risen so much.

Our house value has risen by £10k since May 2016. So it's not like a car in our case. However, the area and availability of houses here helps boost the value a lot!