Help Is At Hand For First-Time Buyers!

Another article in todays Spectator says this.

'selling a share in a shared-equity home is not a straightforward business. You can’t simply place your shared-equity home on the market through an estate agent. Most schemes oblige a vendor to give the housing association the right to sell your share to another of its customers, at a price set by a valuer recommended by the housing association. Only if the housing association fails, usually within eight weeks, to find a customer willing to buy your share may you offer it on the open market.

In a falling market, the prospects for selling shared-equity properties are not good. Shared-equity housing made its first appearance during the 1980s boom, but rapidly fell out of popularity when prices fell and first-time buyers could afford to buy homes outright: long after the market began to recover from its early-Nineties slump, estate agents’ windows still carried dog-eared photographs of shared-equity properties which they could not sell'

and I know which article is more correct!

I have a shared ownership property and from the above I can safely say that what whitefriars has written is absolutely correct. I wanted to sell my 50% share but as above I had to firstly, pay for a HIPS report, secondly, pay for a valuation and thirdly, wait for someone else to be interested in it and buy it. This is called the nomination period where you have to wait around for someone to buy your home. It seemed quite obvious to me that the valuation the 'ha ha' 'Independent' surveyor (nominated and instructed by Inplace) did was based on what I wanted to do. If I was going to buy then they want as much money as they can get so the value would be high and if I wanted to sell the value would be somewhere inbetween to allow for someone to be able to afford the price. The sales and marketing team admitted that they wanted as much money for their property as they could get. But it was up to me to sit it out and sell it or buy it and sell on the open market. I had the estate agents round to value the property and they valued it £5k lower than the association!! It is necessary for you to achieve the price of the valuation otherwise the association would not allow you to sell it and if you achieved higher then they wanted their cut. Despite the fact that you have maintained this property, put in a new bathroom, new kitchen and combination boiler, that was my choice. They still wanted the value of the improvements despite it clearly saying in the literature that this wasn't to be taken into account. No-one at the association really knows what they are doing and there isn't enough interest in the scheme as most people think it's a con. By Brown offering more properties of this type, those that already have them or buy into them are going to find themselves quite stuck as no-one wants a second hand shared ownership home when they can buy a shiny new one down the road!!! I found out that I was pregnant just before I made my decision not to sell, I wasted nearly £400 on ridiculous reports such as HIPS, the guy who did it, counted all two of my windows and then left!!! That was the really hilarious thing, because I don't have energy saving light bulbs I think it was written down as poor lighting!!! Shared ownership makes me quite angry as they will not help you, I don't want to keep this property for the rest of my life and pay the mortgage on it which is what I am doing at the moment. I now live just down the road with my partner but I can say that it has caused us many headaches!!!

Myself and my partner moved into our new house 3 weeks ago which we brought using the Openmarket homebuy scheme whereby we own 100% of the house but have a mortgage from a national lender and another loan (just like a second mortgage) from the scheme which is interest free for 5 years! We could choose any home we wanted and when we come to sell we can sell on the open market just like any other house - we do not have to wait so many weeks for the association to find another interested person to buy. I truely believe that the openmarket homebuy scheme is the best of the shared equity/ownership schemes out there - especially if you choose only to have an interest free loan from the association rather than an extra interest free loan from your mortgage lender - as only about 3 or 4 lenders participate in that scheme. As we chose the option to only take a loan up to 17.5% from the association we could choose any lender we wanted.
Without this scheme we would not have been able to get our own place.
When we sell we pay back the same percentage which we borrowed. so if the value goes up we pay back more (but we still get the uplift in value of the percentage we put in ourselves so are not losing anything on what we put in) If the value goes down we pay back less. We either pay back the loan when we sell or when we can afford to pay off the loan all in one go. As we intend on staying in this house for quite some years we can save up and just pay off the loan without having to sell. So, if the house prices keep going down we can pay back less than we borrowed in the first place and then just sit and wait until the house prices go back up again which they will in time.
We are extremely happy and could not have got such a wonderful home without the help of the scheme!!