'I thought I'd at least get my deposit back'

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

- Charlotte Duck

Project manager Alexandra Porter, 29, was thrilled when she bought a 25 per cent share of a £500,000, three-bedroom flat in Kidbrooke in 2018. "I felt like I was being sold a dream," she says. "But it all came crashing down." She is just one of thousands who have signed up to shared ownership. Under the scheme, you use your deposit and a mortgage to buy a share of a new-build property; a housing association owns the other share and you pay it rent and a service charge. There are 202,000 households living in shared ownership homes in the UK, and London has the lion's share. The idea is that it helps people on to the housing ladder - the problem is, many are finding that selling their property is much harder than buying it.

Porter decided to sell her flat in November 2021 and put it on the market for £540,000 but, by September 2022, she'd only had three viewings. "I rang up the housing association and they admitted there were applications that had been sitting around for two weeks." The housing association, Moat, needed to approve everyone before they could view it and has strict criteria about who can live in the block, including that a household must have an annual income of between £73,000 and £90,000. It's these strict rules, along with "Moat's negligence in dealing with applications", that Porter cites for the lack of interest.

Porter says she was told she could reduce the asking price but it would have to come out of her share and Moat would not be reducing its own or the service charges. Moat denies this policy. It says: “We would not refuse a customer if they decided to reduce the price of their property and they would not ‘forfeit the reduction out of their share’.”