Your Tenancy

Buying your home

Social HomeBuy

Social HomeBuy is an affordable alternative to the Right to Buy. Social HomeBuy is a shared ownership scheme. This means that tenants who want to own their property but cannot afford to buy it outright through the Right to Buy have the opportunity to buy a share of their property. For example, you could buy 40% of your home and the council would own the remaining 60%.

You would be a home owner, and would pay service charges on the share you own and a rent charge on the share that the council still owns. In future you can increase your share by buying further percentages of the property, up to owning the property outright by increasing the share to 100%. You would still get the Right to Buy discount on the share that you buy. The minimum share you can buy to start with is 25%.

Part of the process is a free affordability assessment. This will help you to decide how big a share of your home you can buy.  The links below give illustrative figures based on the average sale price of Council flats for the last 12 months. Please Note: The valuation of your home may differ from the examples.

Examples of monthly costs for Social HomeBuy (pdf file 43.2Kb)

Illustration of estimated one-off purchase costs excluding stamp duty

As with the Right to Buy, to be eligible for Social HomeBuy you will need to have been a public sector tenant for a minimum of two years if your tenancy started before January 18 2005, or five years if your first tenancy started after that date.

If you would like more information please contact Rina Patel on 020 7527 7724 or Darren West on 020 7527 7809 or view our Social HomeBuy guide. (pdf file 187Kb)

You can also visit the Communities and Local Government website.
They have produced a factsheet about the HomeBuy scheme. Social HomeBuy is one of products available under the scheme. Click here to see the factsheet.

For a Social HomeBuy application form, please click here.

For guidance notes on how to complete the application form please click here.

If you are interested in opportunities to buy a property other than your current home through the alternative New Build and Open Market Home Buy schemes, visit Metropolitan Home Ownership’s website for more information.

For a list of shared ownership lenders, click here.