HomeBuy

johnpaul74

Is there an official thread on this subject or does anyone have any good advice on this subject. Looking seriously and this will be our first purchase and looking to get on the ladder soon.

Any help on this will be greatly appeciated.

Cannon_Fodder

No official thread, afaik.

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/search.html

Dozens of threads, some good, some bad.

Short summary;

- helped to get people on the ladder without a deposit in the past, or minimal deposit = 5%, now.
- often not allowed to rent it out, so if you need to move for job/personal reasons, you either sell - perhaps at a loss if this months Nationwide/Halifax figures are anything to go by - or pay for two places to live.
- hard to sell, as Housing Association/Homebuy get first valuation/refusal, potential buyers don't like inability-to-rent clauses = limited market.
- if you go for say, a 25% share, to start - and that's just affordable over 25 years, you will take 100 years to buy the whole place. Before wanting something bigger when you start a family, etc.
- limited to specific Lenders so not the best mortgage deals.
- you get to be responsible for the maintenance of 100%, but the Homebuy participants get to benefit, in the 25% example, from 75% of any increase in value.
- after qualifying for Homebuy you will generally not qualify for anything similar, as one criteria is usually that you are FTBs (exceptions for family breakup etc). So, carrying over just 25% of a 'normal' amount of equity, makes the second house much more expensive, relatively, than if you'd bought the first place on the open market.