Shared ownership (good or bad)

gabyjane

Hi as i have said many times before on these S/O threads is it is so far the best thing we have done..i think the main thing with us we have bought this house as our home not any sort of investment so don't really care if it goes up or down to be quite honest.

We looked at it like this..after years of 'waiting' to buy a house we had been priced out, a 2 bed in the town we need and want to live in is completely out of the picture and still is now if not worse looking at some of the rubbish people are trying to sell!

A new development came up which is very very rare where we are and it is mixed bought and S/O and council..all big houses or luxury flats and we were chuffed to bits to get offered one after being on the S/O list for 7 years!
We have bought a town house which is perfect for us, very good sized garden, driveway garage and off rd parking if need be..very quiet area near the sea etc exactly what we were after.

There are our town houses and then just up the rd there are the bought ones which were valued and bought at around the £169-89k mark..ours was for some reason valued at £153k and is bigger spec and a semi detatched house..no idea why but don't really care!!

To us we want to live in this house and feel secure..rents are far more than our mortgage and god forbid one of us loses our job we will not lose the house which was another thing to take into consideration.

If you can afford a house on the open market and you love it and want to stay there there is no reason not to buy imo..if not wait..S/O imo is the best of both..it is for us anyway!

gabyjane

wymondham wrote: »

I think SO schemes could mask the true problem with housing - houses cost too much, so with SO it increases the buying power of people to purchase these properties - does this really benefit society in the long run, or fuel the problem ?

So do all the 2nd home owners with empty properties sitting around, doesn't give the rest of us a chnace either really does it?

JasminYoung

Buying SO was the only way I could get onto the property ladder - but also, it gave me a larger property and in a better location than I would otherwise have been able to rent - and I could not afford to buy a 100% property at the time.

The problem is that after a while it gets expensive with both the rent and the mortgage, and you have to abide by the staricasing rules.

Also, it is hard to move, as if you want to sell, you are only receiving your percentage back so you can not buy like for like, or move up the property ladder, only sideways. We wanted to move when we owned 60%, but it would have meant moving to a smaller flat so we ended up buying more (80%). Now we are in a better position to move to similar size, but it gets harder and harder to buy the 100% which we really need to do to have control (ie. be able to rent it out or sell on the open market), especially when you are stuck with overpriced valuations (there no way my flat has made 100 grand in the last year when we are supposed to be in a property crash - how does that work?!!!).

I would recomend it, but buy the highest percentage which you can afford, staircase quickly and move out quickly (all things I didn't do!!).

mell242

I think that the main message I would give is...it depends on the location and property!
Many of the houses where SO properties are located are on new build housing estates and having lived on 2 of them I would look very carefully into who your neighbours are.

I had a SO property a good few years ago, I was quite young and jumped at the chance. As a new build the area looked clean and nice but having lived there for 5 years it went totally down hill. Many of the other properties were council owned and the tenants cared little about the look of their properties and the estate in general. There wasn't much of a sense of pride in the area. We had neighbours come and go in the property next to us (the sound insulation was terrible) and when we try to complain to our HA about the noise (at one point our neighbours had 3 ex-greyhounds there that would howl all day and night!) they informed us that another HA owned the property and they could do little about it.

In the end me and my OH felt trapped. We didn't have enough money to buy
on the open market (which is the reason behind the SO schemes) so we decided to sell up and rent. The property was incredibly over-valued when we bought it but when we sold our share the agents appeared to under-value it. We were lucky though, we did make ove 40K in the end as it was the height of the property boom. A lot of other people I know made a lot of money from SO properties and then used that cash as a deposit on their next home. This isn't really possible anymore.

If you get offered a SO home that you fall in love with, just do your research about who your neighbours are and the area. Check you aren't being conned by the value given by the HA (not that you can really question that). Good luck with whatever you decide and in the end it's a very personal choice.