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Let’s stop talking about shared ownership as being separate from buying

As Shared Ownership Week comes to an end, John Rockley argues that the tenure’s brand doesn’t fit into our binary thinking

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Picture: Getty
Picture: Getty
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Let’s stop talking about shared ownership as being separate from buying, writes @JohnRockley of @Rooftop_Housing @SOWeek2018 #ukhousing

“The problem is the name and the human brain” @JohnRockley writes about how shared ownership doesn’t fit into our binary thinking @Rooftop_Housing @SOWeek2018

There’s a problem with shared ownership.

Don’t get me wrong, shared ownership is a great thing; it helps more people to get own their own property, it’s the dream for so many.

It’s a good thing. The problem is the name and the human brain.

Humans like binary decisions – it’s simple, easy and what we’re taught to do. Good and evil, fight or flight, dark and light, and when it comes to the UK housing market it is rent or buy.

And then shared ownership came along, a hybrid of the 2… ‘brent’ if you will.

I’m old enough to remember when most families in my street didn’t own their tellies – Radio Rentals or Rumbelows, that was the norm.

“Humans like binary decisions – it’s simple, easy and what we’re taught to do.”

Some of them found that after a while they could buy their TV.

It was theirs. They bought it, on hire purchase.

Not credit cards or anything fancy like that, they had hire purchase and in their heads they had bought their telly. Hire purchase was buying, renting was renting.

These are two different things.


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Same for houses. I grew up in a mining village in Nottinghamshire and all my friends lived in ‘pit houses’ and I was in a ‘police house’.

We all had rental houses tied to our dad’s job (it was always the dads).

When people saved some money, they then bought a house and they owned it. It was theirs… but it wasn’t, it was the banks.

That’s the big lie about homeownership, the banks own the house until you’ve paid off the mortgage.

We like two choices, even if there are many choices after that one, (or the choice is based on a bit of a lie that we tell ourselves) and shared ownership has been spoken about as a third way, a third option. You only have to ask the Liberal Democrats about how that works out.

Let’s stop talking about shared ownership as something separate from buying a home and change the narrative.

You rent or you buy. How you do those things is in the minutiae. ‘Buy a home’ is our offer not “here’s a special payment plan that means that you can buy a home”.

The process has become the product when the product is actually the house.

Let’s be binary about the big decisions: Tory or Labour, Rent or Buy...

John Rockley, head of communications and marketing, Rooftop Housing Group

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