This page will tell you everything you need to know about selling your Shared Ownership home – if you have any questions about the process you can give our HomesHub team a call on 0151 708 4650 for more details.
Before you ask HomesHub to sell your home for you, there are a few things you’ll need to do first to give yourself the best chance of achieving a quick and smooth sale:
The first step on the journey to reselling your home is to let us know your intention to sell. At this stage, our HomesHub team will guide you through your next steps, and we will be right by your side throughout the whole process to make your sale as easy as possible.
As with selling any home, you need to get a valuation by a qualified surveyor before your home goes on the market. This is especially important for a home bought under the Shared Ownership scheme because the full market value of your home at the time of sale is how much the shares of your home are worth.
For example, if you own a 50% share of your home, and the full market value of your home is £200,000 when the time comes to sell, the sale price will be 50% of £200,000, which is £100,000.
Because of the importance of getting an accurate valuation on your Shared Ownership home when you come to sell, your valuation must be carried out by a RICS valuer rather than an estate agent. This will cost around £150, but your sale cannot proceed without this.
If you aren’t happy with the valuation that you have received on your home, you must appeal it with the valuer – we cannot intervene on your behalf, as RICS are in no way associated with Plus Dane.
We can however advise you on your next steps, but in the case of a disagreement you would need evidence to support a higher or lower valuation that you can send onto them. If this still doesn’t change the outcome, you may want to consider paying for another valuation.
In order to process the sale of your home as quickly as possible, we’ll need some details of your property, including:
When you have collated all this information, you can then send it over to sales@homeshub.co.uk and a member of the team will be in touch.
Once we have all of the details we need from you, we’ll issue you a Contract of Sale, outlining the legal agreement of reselling your home. This will contain all of the key information that you need, including all necessary fees. At this point, you’re now ready to sell your home!
Once you’ve completed the previous steps, your property is now ready to be marketed! We aim to advertise all homes within 5 working days of receiving all of the information required – at this point, we actively advertise your home on our website and look through our database of interested buyers to see if we know anyone who may be interested in buying your property.
If we are unable to find a buyer ourselves, you will be able to put your home on the open market for general sale. If this is the case, we will require the name and contact information of the estate agent that you have instructed to sell your home, so we can keep up-to-date with how your sale is progressing.
Whilst you are welcome to accept a higher offer on your home, we are unable to market your property for more than the RICS valuation.
Whether the applicant comes through the Help to Buy North West database or through the open market, your sales process will proceed in exactly the same way:
As with a traditional house purchase, you will arrange with potential buyers a suitable time for viewing your home.
If an applicant wants to apply for your property, they will need to complete an application on the Help to Buy North West website (as you did when you were buying the property yourself).
Within 4 days we will contact the applicant, informing them if they are eligible and able to proceed. If so, we will then put them in touch with an independent financial advisor to make sure that they are eligible for a mortgage.
Once they have qualified for the necessary mortgage, we will let you know that you have an eligible buyer – at this point, they can put in an offer to you. Like any other property purchase, the offer could be lower or higher than the market value, so it’s up to you whether you accept the offer.
Once you have an agreed offer price, you need to let us know in writing, and we will then reserve the property and send both you and your buyer a written confirmation, at which point you then have 7 days to instruct a solicitor to push through your sale.
Once we have received the contact information for both sets of solicitors, we will then begin the official conveyancing process, which will transfer your property from your name to your buyer’s.
Don’t be worried if it takes some time for your buyer’s mortgage offer to come through – it’s normal for this to take between 4-6 weeks. However, if your buyer hasn’t had a survey of your property within 2 weeks of instructing their solicitor, get in touch with us as soon as possible, as this could delay the process.
Once the buyer’s survey has been completed, your solicitor will send a list of enquiries to our leasehold team. Please note – it can take up to 10 days for us to respond to these enquires, and there may be a fee for this.
Here are some other useful things you might want to know when you're selling your Shared Ownership home:
Did you know the average timescale to sell a home is around 12 weeks from the buyer’s application? However, you can follow these rules to speed up the process:
Something also to bear in mind – your buyer will need to get a valuation of your home from their own mortgage lender before the sale can go through, so if this turns out to be lower than your valuation, the lender will only lend against the lower amount. In the rare event this does happen, you have 3 options:
During the sale of your home, you also need to be aware of the costs you’ll need to pay to get your sale through to completion. These include:
A resale fee covers the administration costs of finding a potential Shared Ownership buyer on your behalf, as well as the administration costs of assessing applicants and our legal fees.
The fee is dependent on your specific lease – you can find out how much your resale fee is in our initial letter we sent to you when you first moved into your home. If you don’t have it to hand, call the HomesHub team and they
can find this out for you.
We require a Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) valuation on all our Shared Ownership properties because they are the world’s leading professional body for standards in land, property, infrastructure and construction.
Because of this, they have comparative data of similar properties in the area and what they have sold for, which they use as part of the valuation process, to get a true indication of what your home is worth.
We know that leading estate agents tend to inflate the purchase price of a home by up to 10% when making a valuation, assuming that the price is up for negotiation – but with a Shared Ownership home, the price is fixed at its current market value, which is why we require an impartial RICS valuation at the time of sale.
Because you bought your home using Government funds as part of their affordable housing scheme, by law your property has to be marketed as affordable housing. The process is generally similar to a traditional property sale, but with the added step that your buyer has to make sure they qualify for the Shared Ownership scheme before the sale can progress.
If we cannot find a suitable buyer for your home using the Shared Ownership database, you’re free to advertise your property on the open market. However, the buyer will have to complete an online application form via the Help to Buy North West website, which will make sure they meet all eligibility criteria. If you do go down the estate agent route, it’s important that you provide us with details of which estate agent you have instructed, so that we can keep up-to-date with the sale of your property.
The quickest and easiest way to find out if you have any restrictions on your lease is to check over all of the paperwork from when you bought your house. Any restrictions will have been documented in there.
Generally, for Shared Ownership homes, some restrictions can be that you can only staircase up to 80-90% of your home and pay rent on the remaining 10-20%. This only applies to a small number of homes and you will have been told this by your solicitor when you purchased your home.
If you’re not sure if your home has any restrictions, get in touch with our HomesHub team who will explain everything to you in more detail.
If you’ve sold your home with an estate agent, it’s best to leave the keys with them for the buyers to collect. If not we’d recommend leaving the keys with your solicitor, for them to hand over once they have received all of the funds.
Whichever way you want to hand over the keys to your buyer, the golden rule is: make sure you’ve communicated this to your buyer, so they know where to go to collect their new keys!
