Shared ownership - Difficult to sell?

GDB2222

There’s been an article in the local newspaper highlighting difficulties people have had selling their shared ownership homes. Are these common problems, or is this just the newspaper make a lot out of little?

https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/shared-ownership-downsides-london-homes-b1056989.html

Shared ownership downsides: meet the Londoners struggling to sell their homes

Shared ownership helps thousands of buyers on to the ladder, but selling on can be a nightmare

…

Bonniepurple

We had no difficulties getting offers for our shared ownership place, however what we found is that there was no consistency.  Our first offer was from a woman who’d already been approved by a different housing association.  She got turned down on affordability.  We remarketed and got an offer from our eventual buyers.  They could buy the 25% outright (as we had - but when we bought it had been unmortgageable!) which meant that they met affordability.

gazfocus

Our first house was a shared ownership and it took about 18 months to sell it. We got an offer relatively quickly but their circumstances changed so couldn’t proceed, then took about 12 months to find another buyer. We only had 3 viewings the entire time the house was up for sale. We couldn’t lower the price because the housing association wanted their share at what the surveyor said it was worth and wouldn’t budge, so any reduction had to come out of our share, and we needed to clear the mortgage so could only go so low. 

rachael88

We sold our shared ownership property in 2018, it went up for sale on a Friday and we had 3 offers at asking price by the following Tuesday. We went with a first come first serve strategy as they had all been pre approved by the housing association that owned the other half of the property and it was part of the contract that we couldn't sell for more than the independent valuation. 
All fairly straight forwards and we completed in around 8 weeks. I think it helped that we used estate agents with a lot of experience in shared ownership properties.

diystarter7

GDB2222 said:

There’s been an article in the local newspaper highlighting difficulties people have had selling their shared ownership homes. Are these common problems, or is this just the newspaper make a lot out of little?

https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/shared-ownership-downsides-london-homes-b1056989.html

Shared ownership downsides: meet the Londoners struggling to sell their homes

Shared ownership helps thousands of buyers on to the ladder, but selling on can be a nightmare

…

Hi
I would never buy on one of these projects as I visited some and more than half were social housing that puts some people off so its just an extra hurndel come sell time.

Then you have service charges and then someone else owns part of your property that wants to set their own price when selling - puts me off.

Its almost a buyer's market and I knew of no one at work, family, friends etc that bought shared ownership. Looks tempting but IMO its not a good deal as it intially looks.

Thanks

[Deleted User]

It's certainly not going to make it easier to sell. Another check the buyers have to pass, more time and expense.

Emlulo

We took about two years to sell ours. In hindsight, I would never have bought one!

As others have said, you can’t lower the price unfortunately. We had four asking price offers, but each one got turned down for a mortgage. Our estate agent said it was because there was an electricity pylon within 30ft of the property. Turns out that was untrue, and that he was just incredibly incompetent and did not have experience in selling shared ownership. Once we changed to an EA that DID have experience, we had another offer which then completed in about three months.

So, again as others have said - get an EA who has lots of experience in selling shared ownership and it’ll make the process a LOT easier!