shared ownership - advice please

we rent a house of a housing association - have done for 3 yrs now (we were told after 3yrs we had the right to buy,they then changed it to 5yrs!),they have offered us a shared ownership scheme they do,theyve got 2 bed apartments and 3 bed houses - which i must admit the houses are gorgeous,new builds,never been lived in and very new and modern kitchen and bathroom.

but im not understanding much about it really! they say we can buy 50% for £64,975 and then pay the other 50% rent (roughly £200) - to me this seems like i will be paying a hell of alot out but looking around at mortgages,the mortgage will only be just over £150 - depending on other things!! now yeh - we aint got the bect credit rating,in fact its been pretty shite but we got back on our feet and are slowly moving on from that - but the cloud of that still looms over us for however many years it stays on your records!!

i was just wondering if anybody has applied/lives in/attempted to buy/or been turned down for a shared ownership scheme or if you have any other advice to offer... do you think its something to steer well clear of or are they a good idea for those who cant get on the property ladder?

3yrs ago,we were hunting the property ladder - saw numerous houses fell in love with one got a mortgage sorted and all that and then were gazumped (sp?) by someone who offered 50% cash payment (obviously the seller wouldnt turn that down!) so we were again searching,found another house,got the house,payed alot of money out for deposit,search fees,etc and kev goes and has a bad accident at work,breaks his neck,out of work for months,we cant keep up with paying bills/loans/store cards - hence the debt and bad credit rating... we applied for the council but at the time we werent important, then we had a phone call from the housing association and weve been with them ever since...

would all that went on (debt wise) affect the shared ownership??

hopefully somebody can help or has been here themselves!

Sounds like you had a rough time and were really unlucky. I guess there was no insurance in place to pay the mortgage and other bills while Kev was out of work. (That's assuming they didn't find a loop hole not to pay like most insurance companies try to)

If you ended up with CCJ's or even worse bankrupt, then these can sit on your financial records for years, at least 5 years I think. If you have been good since then hopefully the banks that you currently use will have recognised this and their own internal credit scoring for you may be better than that from an external source such as Experian. If you want to know what your financial report says about you speak to Experian http://www.experian.co.uk/

If you have poor credit then you may find it difficult to get the mortgage, but otherwise it should not affect the shared ownership, although I think for a mortgage of £64,000 you would be looking at a mortgage of £450 per month not £150 per month. Still if you can't afford to buy a house outright then this could be a good way. However you should check what would happen if you want to move, or if later on you wanted to buy the rest of the property. Most likely if you try to buy the rest later that they will revalue the property and charge 50% of current market value.

I don't know where you live or what the house prices are like, but for the extra bit it may be worth getting your own place owned outright. Also see if you can find out about other people who have taken up this scheme with the Housing Association and check with them what their experience was. Do a search online and see if you can find any horror stories, or maybe some good ones.

Hope some of my babble is useful.

thanks for the advice youve listed some good points - but no,its too much to buy a house where we live... next door (a 2bed terrace in desperate need of modernisation has just sold for £102,000,theyve gotta sort it out yet - and its got no back door,just a board,nor does it have double glazing!)

we havent got ccjs or never been blacklisted or anything like that,i never let it get that bad,we fell behind on credit cards loans store cards catalogues ect and i got in touch with a debt management company who combined all the outgoing debts and we pay them monthly (which we will have all paid off next year!! woohoo!!)

we have thort about just staying where we are now and buying it when the time comes - its just with it being a 2bed terrace u never know what the future holds baby-wise and so we could ideally do with the room (but if im thinking like that if we do have anotther baby,the housing association will move us anyway to somewhere bigger - then we will be able buy that!!) hmmm... descicions!! i think il just wait for the papers come thru about all of the shared ownership malarky and have a read!!

how are you anyways? iv read you posts but not replied as i have no experience in what your going thru and i dont like to offer advice on things i dont know im talking about! all i can say is that things will work out for you... we all go thru the crap in ourlives,but we all come back stronger from it.x

I've got no clue when it comes to houses and that. If you do have another baby sometimes it takes a while for them to move you. We have a bidding system here, you bid on a house and depending how desperate you are etc you get the place. Its annoying that the property ladder is getting so hard to get onto. I'd love to get my own place one day but it looks so slim atm.

the housing association we are with dont use points,they just move you when you want if theres available housing,and if u need to.theyre pretty good to be honest and i would recommend them to anybody as theyre all over the uk not just this area - u dont have estates either like u do with the council,its just the odd hopuse here and there... we r the only housing association on our street - nobody even knew it was a housing association who owned the house till we told the neighbours! everyone thort we brort it! and we can do whatever we want to the house so long as we inform them first - we recently widened the loft hatch as we couldnt fit thru it! we have got it good with them,but we would just like to get on theproperty ladder sooner rather than later! as i can imagine when the 5yr comes they change it to 10!! haha!!

which part of stoke are you in? as i was living up there for a while and know where i was in birches head there was 2 and 3 bed terraces selling from about 80k-100k

im in hartshill,on the border of newcastle.its quiet and i live by the lovely fields of harpfields,if i was to move closer to stoke itself where its alot cheaper,id have to face the horrid things that come with it! i think with propeties you get what you pay for - which in a way is a good thing as it keeps the nutters out of the nicer areas but still,it prevents the decent people who cant afford gettin out of the shitty areas too!

i know roughly where you mean yeah. living in the city centre itself has its problems like one idiot knicked the actually mirror out of my wingmirror.. i mean why? i liked where i was cos i was 10min walk from hanley and the potteries and about a 20-30 min walk from fessy park which was handy but i knew i didnt really want to bring izzy up that close to the city centre i wanted her to have countryside so i dont blame you for wanting to stay in a nicer part of the city

My friend has just bought a housing association apartment and she owns 65% of it, she doesn't need to pay any rent back for the other amount, the council own the other 35%

Her block is housing association, but the rest are just normal full price apartments. As far as I know all new housing developments have to have a percentage of affordable homes, usually housing association.

It is probably worth just being cheeky and going into the sales offices on any new developments and asking which housing association it is?

My friend had to go to a meeting where they showed her around and she had to make her mind up there and then if she wanted it. On the downside, she had to have a mortgage offer and £300 ish to put down as a deposit, so basically if she had decided she didn't want it she would have had gone to all the trouble of arranging a mortgage but not needed it in the end.

I'm not sure whether all housing associations are like this though.

i know what housing association it is,its the one we are with now,which is why they have offered us first refusal on it before it goes in the estate agents - but as far as im aware we have to pay part rent part mortgage which i think is going to be alot! just waiting for the forms to come thru - but we have been talking and think it might be best to stay here afterall! weve already made it into what we want and this time next yr have the right to buy - its just that its only 2/bed and if we have a little girl,as we are trying,we will have to move! got my housing officer coming at 11am tomorrow to discuss furthur things so i will let you all know how things go with that!!