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Banks ‘crying out’ for more shared ownership opportunities
Banks are “crying out” for more opportunities to lend on shared ownership as the “tables have turned” on the initiative, delegates at Housing 2018 heard.
Speaking at Housing 2018, Kelly McCabe, managing director of mortgage broker The Mortgage People, argued that lenders are “really open for business” on shared ownership.
“We have 25 or 26 lenders in the space, like Barclays and Halifax; they are crying out for more of it,” she told delegates.
“The tables have turned, for many years it was me banging on doors.”
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The popularity of shared ownership as a tenure has at times suffered from a lack of wider understanding, with a YouGov survey last year revealing four in 10 people didn’t understand the initiative’s benefits.
Amy Nettleton, assistant development director at Aster Group, told delegates “there is still a real job to do around awareness-raising on share ownership”.
She added: “There’s still the misconception that it comes with a raft of criteria and it is inaccessible, which is really far from the truth.”
Ms Nettleton called the on the industry to “wake up” to the role that shared ownership can play in helping tackle the housing crisis. “It goes a long way to solving that and can give people a security of tenure,” she added.
She also said Aster is seeing shared ownership emerge in other markets, away from the first-time buyer market, including when people are downsizing after a relationship breakdown.
