Shared Ownership for Older Persons

bobbiesgirl2004

Shared ownership for the over 55's, a Government Scheme to enable over 55's to buy a house up to 75% (your equity), you cannot buy more than that, however once you hit the 75% ceiling you don't pay rent on the remaining 25%.
After redundancies during the Covid crisis, this seemed to be an ideal way to keep our equity, rather than opting for a equity release scheme, or even worse the scheme that takes all of your equity, adds less than 20% and keeps the property if you die or go into a home.
However....whilst the scheme is in place for older people the choice of property is extremely limited and suited to families or people who want a flat, all very expensive in our view.  You can buy an older property, but it must be a shared ownership re-sale.
So we contacted the Help to Buy nominated company, after being accepted onto the scheme, and were told 'our website is rubbish, go to Zoopla and filter properties by shared ownership', excellent we thought, a nice choice came up. We then contacted the various estate agents, and were told the properties showing on the filter weren't shared ownership, so what next?

• We have emailed Zoopla, to find out why their filters are mistakenly showing properties as shared ownership;
• We have contacted the Help to Buy company and asked how we can progress given the extremely limited choice, too far away from our family too, and said they aren't catering for older people (older, not old);
• We have contacted a large Housing Association and stated our situation and asked for help.

It seems ridiculous to be in this situation at this time of our life (5 years off of retirement), the help is supposed to be available but not accessible unless you want a modern new build on an estate or in a block of flats.
Time is of the essence, since we have sold our home and don't want to delay and default on our mortgage, anything sensible anyone can suggest would be great. 

carefullycautious

The problem with this is that you would have to be assessed for the property and if there is only 2 of you, you would only be entitled to a 1 -2 bed property. Most of the older properties I have seen which are shared ownership are 3 bed family homes that would discount older buyers.
I too would be interested in this as many years ago I phoned a housing association to ask about the 75% ownership with no rent to be paid on the extra 25% and was told in no uncertain terms that there was no such thing as not paying rent on remaining shares. I gave up in the end as I came up against what you have. As you have not had any other replies it looks like others may have had the same problems?

TBagpuss

I think the issue is that Shared Ownership properties are often one of the ways which developers are able t fulfil the affordable housing requirements so the majority will be (relatively) new builds and mostly on estates, and as only a small proportion of properties are shared ownerships it's not surprising that there is limited availability. As with most kinds of social housing, your choice is always going to be limited ad subject to the rules and policies of the relevant HA or LA

I think you will have to decide which compromises you want to make - shard ownership with 25% rent free, but in a location or type of setting which wouldn't be your fist choice, or a property that's more to your tastes but which you have to fund by way of equity release .  

Another option might be to sent for a while to give yourselves time to wait for the right property to come up, but of course the downside to that is that you can't know how long it may take, or what will happen to house prices in the mean time

AnotherJoe

bobbiesgirl2004 said:

It seems ridiculous to be in this situation at this time of our life (5 years off of retirement), the help is supposed to be available but not accessible unless you want a modern new build on an estate or in a block of flats.
Time is of the essence, since we have sold our home and don't want to delay and default on our mortgage, anything sensible anyone can suggest would be great. 

if you've sold your home, how do you have a mortgage?????

What's wrong with a new build ?

Can you downsize instead ?