Shared ownership housing - Are they distorting the market

nigel75

Discuss....

In my opinion they must be. The market in theory should assume that as houses are still being sold, the whole strength of the market remains strong where as in fact its just a case of there being more rented accomodation. Would be interesting to know peoples views on this who know a little bit more about this than I do.

dmg24

Shared ownership forms an absolute minority of properties, and so would hardly distort the overall market.

indiegirl_2

I guess you could argue that s/o does distort the market but in a good way.

If there wasn't S/O in certain areas of the country, the housing market would've ground to a halt. In our area, S/O is one of the reasons that the housing market is still moving and (in my case) the sole reason for me being able to afford to buy a house outright after just 8 months in a S/O property.

Had I not been able to buy a S/O property, I'd have still been in a rented place, saving desperately for a deposit to buy outright. Instead, I bought a new build s/o place and have made 5x as much as I could've saved in there 8mths (granted, I'm benefitting from house prices rising too).

If there were no s/o properties, it's very unlikely that FTBs can get onto the market to start the chains... so house prices won't move very much unless existing buyers are prepared to further themselves - and there's only a limited amount of time for everyone who's prepared to do that...

You'd be looking at a static market with v little movement - in terms of house prices and actual movers...