Can anyone recommend a solicitor familiar with shared ownership sales?

JuliaCM

Hi all,

We are thinking of selling our shared ownership house.

We are having it valued by a RICS surveyor next week (as we have to in our contract).

The trust which owns the other half of our house is allowed 4 weeks to try and sell it (with 1%comission) and then we can put it on the open market.

I am not planning on using an agent as i think it is more likely to sell by word of mouth, to someone who was in the same situaton we were four years ago (could get a decent mortgage but it would only stretch to a two bed flat here, not a 2/3 bed house which we needed). So I plan on marketing it online and in the local paper ourselves. There are very few shared ownership houses that I have seen, they all seem to be flats. Ours is a three bed end of terrace.

Any tips or advice woudl be appreciated.

HappyMJ

Any solicitor or conveyancer will have knowledge of shared ownership. Why don't you use the same one you used when you bought the place?

I would not recommend marketing it yourself. Agents don't charge much and will give you a much wider audience. You can choose full service or only for them to introduce potential purchasers to you and you show them around and for you to try and sell the property. If the introduction comes from adverts you have placed you can have a contract in which only the agent who introduces the final purchaser gets the fee.

JuliaCM

Thanks for the response.

The ones we used when we bought the house were AWFUL. They were suggested to us by the trust, but they have since dropped them due to their incompetence!

Our lease now is a joke, with so many of their mistakes in it. I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.

Well agents want 1.25% or 1.75%....which is rather a lot of money on a 320k/ 80k share of a house...We haven't decided for certaib yet, but it will make the difference as to whether we break even or loose a chunk of our deposit and end up out of pocket...

Thanks tho, we will think about it

bunnybunnyrabbit

You may not even have to go down that route - the Housing Association may easily be able to find a buyer (I am presuming it's a HA as you said shared ownership). I don't know what it's like in your area but I work in this field and we get so many enquiries about shared ownership houses. As soon as one comes on the market, there's a queue of people wanting to apply. Like you said, there are so many shared ownership flats, but houses are what more people want.

JuliaCM

Thanks. We rent it off a housing association as due to some legalities we couldn't rent it off the owners directly- Asset Trust.

I have my fingers crossed. We live in a new build development, a mix of mainly private with some S.O and some H.A. There were about 20 S.O flats and only 4 houses when they were originally built and sold and I know there was a lot of interest at the time.... but when I spoke to Asset Trust this week they said they have reduced their entitlement to try and sell it from the 8 weeks in our contract to 4 weeks instead "due to the current market"....

I mentioned something on my fb and have had several people message me and ask to know more/how S.O works, so we shall see....

lindsaygalaxy

If its near to me, i'll take it!

Richard_Webster

Beware that some HAs allow their solicitors to charge all sorts of fees for admin functions relating to sales of SO properties so be prepared to shell out for that.

gazareth

Richard_Webster wrote: »

Beware that some HAs allow their solicitors to charge all sorts of fees for admin functions relating to sales of SO properties so be prepared to shell out for that.

Yep - just exchanged on the sale of a SO property, full value £210K our share £84K and we are paying/have paid the HA:

• 1% of full value + VAT admin fee
• £135 pre-sales fee
• £213.90 for their solicitors fees