Selling Shared Ownership

cpat1993

Hello,

Just wondering if anyone has sold a shared ownership property recently. We put ours up for sale on the 25/2/19 and someone else on our estate with the same size property but mid terraced (we are end) put theirs up 5 days before us and is under offer already.

Just wondering how quickly shared ownership houses are selling at the moment? We haven't heard anything from the housing association since we sent our forms of confirming we wanted to sell.

Our housing association are very slow so just concerned, people are registering interest and they aren't doing anything!

Is there anything we can do to speed the process up?

mk_78

I'd imagine it depends what part of the country you're in but where I live (South East) shared ownership houses are snapped up, often within hours! When I was buying I would ring up having seen a rightmove ad and if you didn't ring up in the first half an hour you wouldn't even get a viewing.


I did find that those which were advertised directly with the housing assocation, on the Help to Buy website, stuck around for longer. Most of the housing associations I dealt with were pretty slow, especialy when trying to arrange a viewing as you had to click 'register your interest' and then wait a few days for someone to even get back to you.


If the market where you live is still strong then it may be in your interest to wait out the one month nomination period (or whatever your HA's period is) as you should then be able to add a 'premium' for works done. Again where I live, most properties had a minimum 10k premium. Frustratingly many of those hadn't even had so much as a lick of paint let alone 10k worth of improvements! One I saw was an absolute wreck that was like something you see on the TV that squatters have lived in.... it still had a 10k premium and sold within a week.

cpat1993

We're in Cornwall. Our lease is really strict, we can't increase the value unfortunately.

We also have to pay a 1% fee to the HA so £1360 for selling the house and that doesn't reduce after 8 weeks like most others seem too. So if we want to go with an EA we have to pay both which seems really unfair. Having said that the other property that is under offer near us went up with an estate agent a few days after going up for sale with the HA, which according to the terms of the lease we aren't able to list with an EA until after 8 weeks.

mk_78

The premium doesn't increase the value as that's set by the HA, the purchase price is set eg £250,000 with a 50% share would be 125k to the HA and 125k to you. A premium is a lump sum that's payable to you on completion and is supposed to be for 'improvements' eg new windows, new carpets, new bathroom etc If these improvements were factored into the house price then the HA would be benifiting from your improvements eg if windows cost 5k and increased the value by 5k then 2.5k of that would be going to the HA.



Most of the HA's I was looking at did not allow a premium to be added when the sale was in the nomination period but once that had passed a premium could be added. In relaity 90% of the sellers that had added a premium were taking the mick but that's just the way the market is round here. That would be the only positive aspect in having a slow HA!

vroombroom

We're in the NE and have our shared ownership up. It's been up for sale since June last year and we've had one offer. Unfortunately it was too low a offer - we have a figure from the HA we need to sell at and if it we get an offer too low, we have the make up the difference, which we're not in a position to do unfortunately. Hindsight is a wonder thing