Shared ownership FTB experience

P_O_W_L

Hi all,

My first post although Ive been reading these forums for a while now. I've seen a lot written about peoples house buying experiences so I thought Id share mine.

Myself and my partner are on a relatively low income (will be around £28k combined). We need to move quite soon and have managed to save up a deposit of £7200 in the past year. We are extremely proud to have done this as we have had no help from anyone in our families and I literally had £0 coming out of uni in 2009. The reasons we need to move are that my mum is disabled and living in a bungalow so she really needs the space. Also my partner didnt go to uni and is now 23 so her relationship with her parents and younger siblings is becoming stretched.

Anyway, as you can see, on our income and deposit we felt we could do one of 2 things:

- go for cheap house & area then do it up with 100% ownership
- go for nice house and area (relatively speaking here) and go shared ownership.

I reckon weve thought pretty hard about this. We know many of the common pitfalls with SO properties (poor HA, difficult to sell on etc), but we see it as though these kind of schemes are made for people like us. The House is lovely, the area (Wixams in Beds) is a completely new village and is looking really nice with a lovely old village called Wilstead within walking distance. its a £160k new build 2 bed and weve taken 30% (we could have stretched to 50% but tbh we felt that if we needed to sell it on quick/soon, low income people like ourselves would be more inclinced to go for a lesser %age as surely they would wait to buy outright instead if they had a decent wedge???
For a new build its really nice, massive garden for what we expected, solar panel, 2 car ports, lovely kitchen already installed etc.

So we are hoping to exchange today. I thought Id share my experience of the process.

Mortgage lenders: Nationwide. they were the only ones willing to offer us SO as I have one mark on my credit file where the sodding Natwest called in my student overdraft a year early but didnt inform me (my fault as I forgot to change address back to home after uni). I paid it all back the day I was informed but my card was already marked unfortunately. 85% LTV with legal fees and valuation covered.

WARNING!!!! valuations paid for by the lender means the valuers will not care about getting it done properly. We had to have 6 separate valuation reports done through Countrywide Val services (Nationwides chosen company) as they continuously put the wrong details. The first one stated that we were purchasing 70% shared equity and it took until the 6th one for them to spell the address correctly. Really really poor service from them.

Also the HA had everything sorted until 2 days ago when they tried to convince us that the lease was 125 years not the 99 years that me and my solicitor had got written in front of us on the draft lease!! took a fax to prove to them that we werent lying about the document they had sent out!!

Apart from that we are all set to go. Its been pretty smooth for us apart from the valuation thing but we are counting no chickens until completion which will hopefully be next friday.


Hope Ive helped some other SO FTB's by sharing my experience as generally the advice is really negative about the scheme. I know it could turn out the same for us but Im optimistic that we can overpay our mortgage enough to make it a worthwhile investment.

What does everyone think. Constructive critisism of SO still needed. If anyone has any advice of things to watch out for, issues we might not have thought about, please feel free!!

Cheers

Flibertigibit

I lived in an SO house for 6 years very happily, however I think a lot of that was because it was originally a private house on a private estate (for a time some HA's let you buy private and I assume that's how they came to acquire this one). Now I am in a 2 bed SO flat with a different HA. I have had quite a lot of problems with them regarding services and service charges, but I expect that's par for the course. There are 22 SO flats on this (small) development, built in 2006, and there are also private blocks of flats and houses too. I enjoy living here - it's quiet and generally pleasant.

BUT I think problems can arise where the HA has a mix of SO and rented on the same development. There are two estates near to me where this is the case and they have had terrible problems with youths and anti-social behaviour. The worst estate was finished after mine and already looks a mess with rubbish and overgrown gardens and has a notorious reputation. So the big question is whether your "village" includes properties for people on the local authority housing list? Of course lots of them are decent people who need housing for whatever reason, but some of them will be families with problems and/or people from eastern Europe and Africa, which can cause tensions. You might also find that the existing residents of the "lovely old village" have not taken kindly to having a new estate dumped on their doorstep, so there could also be tensions there.

I'm really sorry if all this sounds negative, but you did say "If anyone has any advice of things to watch out for, issues we might not have thought about, please feel free!!", so I have! Hope none of these issues affect you and I hope you and your partner are able to enjoy your beautiful new house in the countryside.