Home ownership

Wed, 22/02/2012 - 14:25 — Heidi Foster

Resident

In this section you can see the options that are available for tenants in social housing, and those on low incomes, for home ownership.

Help to Buy

The Help to Buy scheme is made up of two elements:

1. An ‘equity loan’ where the Government will lend buyers between 10% - 20% of the value of a new build home
2. A ‘mortgage guarantee’ which will incentivise lenders to make more mortgages available for people with small deposits. This part of the scheme will not be available until 2014.

You can find more details of the Help to Buy equity loan scheme on the HM Treasury website (www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/ ). The key differences between Help to Buy and FirstBuy are:

• The scheme is open to existing homeowners as well as first time buyers.
• There is no income cap for buyers
• The maximum property value is £600,000
• The entire equity loan will be provided by the Government, rather than being part funded by the developer

All applications for Help to Buy will be handled by local HomeBuy Agents as with FirstBuy.

The HCA have confirmed that we will begin to accept applications for Help to Buy from April 2013 although the initial priority will be transferring existing FirstBuy applications that do not exchange by 31st March 2013.

The HCA has written to all existing FirstBuy developers outlining their proposals for transferring from FirstBuy to Help to Buy. Organisations with a FirstBuy grant agreement and current allocation on 1st April 2013 are deemed to be registered to market Help to Buy from 1st April 2013 subject to the requirement to enter into a new agreement for Help to Buy with the HCA by the end of April 2013 in order to fully complete their registration.

The scheme is expected to run until 2016 (subject to annual budget limits) and is available to any developer who wishes to register for the scheme.

The right to buy (secure tenants only)

You have the Right to Buy when you have spent at least five years as a public sector tenant although there are some exceptions to this. For further details, please see the Right to Buy guide from the Department of Communities and Local Government in our useful links area.

If you are eligible for the right to buy, you will be entitled to a discount based upon how long you have been a public sector tenant, and whether you are purchasing a house or a flat.

For further information about buying your flat, please see the Department of Communities and Local Government leaflet called "Thinking of buying your council flat". You can also see the long leaseholders pages.

If you would like to apply, see the Right to Buy from the www.gov.uk website and fill out our supplementary form.

Cash incentive scheme (secure tenants only)

This scheme, which is also sometimes called the Home Move Purchase Grant, gives you a lump sum towards buying a property in the private sector when you are releasing your Tendring District Council property so that we can then rent it to a family in need.

For more information, please see our guidance and form in our useful documents area.

Long Leaseholders

If you have bought a council flat or have a long term lease agreement with us, our long leaseholder pages give useful information on issues such as your service charges, planned works etc as well as your leaseholder's handbook.

For those of you living or renting in the private sector, please see our private sector housing pages for advice on various issues such as: