Spotlight on shared ownership

Our shared ownership homes help our customers onto the property ladder, through using a smaller deposit to buy a share in their home. Read Stephanie’s story here, who moved into her home last Autumn.

Using the scheme, Stephanie and her partner bought a 25% share of their three bedroom semi detached home in Little Meadow, Cranleigh in October last year. We asked her a few questions about why she chose shared ownership: 

What was your situation before? 

My husband and I have been together for 10 years and we’ve always been in private rental. We had our son Finley, who is five, and felt we were paying a lot of money with our rental home.

What made you look into buying? 

We decided that when the rental was up for renewal, we would move in with my parents to start saving and luckily were gifted some money to help with the deposit. We knew as soon as we weren’t paying the private rent, we could start saving money towards our house purchase.

In your opinion, what are the benefits of living in a shared ownership home? 

Security and stability are the main thing for us with it being part-owned by us. Knowing that we have our own home, we’ve now ordered our new sofa and know that if we want to paint our son’s room bright blue – we can do that. Since we’ve been here, it’s amazing, every few weeks my husband and I say, ‘we can’t believe this is ours’!

How did you find the buying process during the pandemic?

We managed to look around the property at the beginning of March with someone from the team and every time after that we viewed by ourselves. Unfortunately, both myself and my husband spent some time on furlough and our mortgage company needed to do further checks. I felt safe during the process and comfortable with how we were reassured.

If you would like more information on shared ownership, visit our website.