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Instead of selling it and buying a new place you mean?
trouble is in my current area, there is a distinct lack of shared ownership sites. a few are coming up and I am on their email list.
jaitch-
While I was living there, it was reasonably fine. Sure, the housing association were somewhat officious occasionally, and consistently useless at doing anything simple like engaging repair men, informing us that there would be scaffolding going up or finishing painting things, but I had 18 years in the place so it must have been alright. But HAs are generally interested only in building new flats and selling them on, just like any other developers.
When I wanted to sell it I was still a 50% owner, and had to buy the other half from the HA and sell it to the buyer at the same time (in something called back-to-back staircasing and sale). I had a massive ballache trying to persuade them to let me do this, and drop their 8 weeks option to sell it shared ownership to social tenants. Fine idea, but by then the market price was over half a million pounds, and anyone who could raise the £250,000 to buy the 50% would have been ineligible for shared ownership under their criteria anyway, so it would have been a 8 weeks of wasted time. This bit of maths eluded them for a while.
Then there was the discovery that people who work for housing associations are apparently the ones who were too slow and thick to get jobs in local councils. They were so inefficient, slow, useless and unprofessional that they almost torpedoed my sale, and it was only by ringing up loads of people there all the time and demanding that they sort things out right there while I was on the phone that I managed to complete in time.
I would have saved a ton of stress and panic by having bought out the whole flat and extended the lease during the 18 years I lived in it, thereby cutting the HA out of the loop entirely. And I would have made maybe £100,000 more money to boot.
bq
I bought shared ownership and it was fine until I wanted to sell. In hindsight I would have bought the other half as soon as it was even slightly possible.