Shared Ownership Staircasing Delays

Grant_Urismo

Hello everyone, I wonder if anyone else is in the same boat as us, or has any advice to offer?

We are trying to staircase our shared ownership from 45% to 100%. We sent off the form to start the process over 3 months ago, but despite everyone saying this is a fairly simple process and that we have a legal right to staircase, the completion date keeps moving backwards and backwards. We were supposed to complete last week, and then it was supposed to be today, but yesterday we were told the vendor's solicitors are drafting a new document everyone needs to sign, which means another week's delay and another week's rent going out of our pockets and into the pockets of the vendors.

We've already had to have a re-valuation, and now our mortgage offer is close to expiring. Is there anything we can do to make the sale actually happen, or can the housing association keep stringing things out (and charging us more rent) indefinitely?

Grant_Urismo

Update: Another day, another delay from their end - they can't send the new document they promised we'd get today because 'it needs to be signed by the solicitor and he's gone home'.

BarryBlue

My daughter's last property was on a government shared-ownership scheme, HOP. She needed to change the interest in the property from joint to hers solely before she sold it. It was an absolute nightmare and took almost two years to finalise.

HOP are the most incompetent, lazy bunch of procrastinators and liars you could ever imagine. In the end she did manage to get a huge slab of compensation from them for the stress, delay and additional legal costs. Absolutely nothing would surprise me with those cowboys.

brit1234

Shared ownership is a nightmare for this kind of thing, have you considered doing the maths and seeing if paying off the mortgage on the part you own is a cheaper alternative instead of staircasing. It might be easier to sell then and you are protected more from price falls.

Grant_Urismo

Thanks brit1324, we've done our maths, and this is definitely the right way to go. Our staircasing agreement forces us (and them) to stick to the value given by a valuer chosen by the housing association, and this applies if we staircase or if we sell. Our tactic was to get the valuation done first, and then decide to sell (if the value was high) or staircase (if it was low). We think it was low, so we're staircasing... and we have no reason to believe that the process of selling would be any less stressful than buying.

Anyway, today's update - this mysterious 'document' has arrived - it's a new transfer deed with an extra eleven pages of garbled and contradictory restrictive covenants that they have decided to spring on us! They want to have the right to enter our property, for us to pay part of the electricity bill for a block of flats down the road in perpetuity, to prevent us selling the house without giving them first refusal, and a whole load of other stuff.

Hands up who thinks it's fair to suddenly throw this at us 1 working day before completion, given that we are over 3 months into the process?

Grant_Urismo

Another update: We've spotted that our lease states that if we staircase to 100%, we will be buying "with full title guarantee", which is what the first transfer document said, while the new document we are being asked to sign is "with limited title guarantee".

Our solicitors haven't been much help explaining this (so any input for the forum on this would be really appreciated), but as far as I can tell from reading the relevant law, this means we can tell the vendor where to stick their 11 pages of restrictions and covenants. The other side have agreed to change the wording back to "full title", but haven't yet agreed to remove the restrictions and covenants. We will see what tomorrow brings...

G_M

How annoying!

Why start a 2nd thread?

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5606456

Grant_Urismo

G_M wrote: »

Why start a 2nd thread?

Because I have 2 different issues and am asking 2 different questions. This thread is about staircasing delays, the other one is about strange contract wording. Splitting the two up will help someone with just one of these issues find the relevant thread in future.

Grant_Urismo

Update:

We completed yesterday, with full title guarantee. The vendor's solicitors kicked up a fuss about full title, but the vendor was fine with it, so we ended up signing exactly the same transfer agreement that we proposed 2 weeks ago. The vendor's solicitors hadn't even shown this to the vendor at the time!

I think we're in a fairly strong position to ask for them to return the extra rent we paid because of the delay, so basically the situation is: big decisive battle won, now on with the war!