No Mortgage, No House, and Two Very Confused Cats

What an absolute mess of a month. If you’re here to witness the unglamourous, soul-crushing realities of buying a Shared Ownership house in the UK, pull up a chair. If not, flee now while you still have your sanity! 

We left in July with an actual eviction possession claim hanging over our heads for the house we’re currently renting (see previous posts for that ongoing drama). I’d submitted our defence statement to the county court, feeling ridiculously pleased with myself. In my head, all of this court business was totally irrelevant. We were going to be long gone, keys in hand, sipping tea in our new kitchen before any judge even sniffed our file. We were fine. We were so tantalisingly close to completing that the only thing left to do was pick an exchange date and pick up the keys.

Honestly, I was so proud of the legal masterpiece I sent to the judge. Feast your eyes on this:

And Hank's statement ...  

Turns out, we were not fine.

There was a giant, sleeping monster of a problem lurking in the background. A leviathan that had been ignored, unacknowledged, and left buried for weeks—just waiting for me to open the final property report so it could jump out and slap me.

The exact day I posted our defence statement to the court was, of course, the exact day that property report landed. Out the door with one problem, and in the door with another.

(Quick pause for anyone who isn't up to speed: Shared Ownership is a government-backed scheme designed to help people get onto the property ladder without needing a massive deposit right out of the gate. You buy a partial stake in the home—usually anywhere from 10% to 75%—with a standard mortgage and deposit, and then pay a subsidized rent to a housing association on whatever share is left over. Because it’s funded through public programs like the Affordable Homes Programme, housing associations have to follow strict rules on who qualifies, how rent is calculated, and how "staircasing" works when you're ready to buy up more of the property over time. We are buying a 55% share in a £200,00 house.)

Anyway, back to the drama. The week this final report arrived was naturally the exact week my conveyancer decided to go on holiday. Typical. Yet somehow, that was also the week we got the most "progress"! (I’m saying nothing).

I opened the report. Tucked right at the top, above all the resolved enquiries, sat the problem. A massive roadblock involving the freehold title:

"There is a restriction on the freehold title for which consent is required before the title can be transferred."

In plain English? This sneaky little restriction meant the house had to stay legally trapped as "affordable housing" forever. It could never be staircased up to 100% ownership unless someone granted a legal exemption or absolute guarantee. 

Who, what? Consent from whom? What if they said no? Could they even say no?

The Housing Association’s information pack, which I received right at the start of this journey, proudly promised:

• Maximum share you can own: 100%
  

• Transfer of freehold: At 100% ownership, the freehold will transfer to you.
  

So what on earth was going on?

And why does any of this matter? Well, it matters immensely to the mortgage lender.

No lender on earth is going to hand over tens of thousands of pounds without a guarantee of eventual freehold ownership. If we defaulted on our mortgage payments and they had to repossess, they want the whole damn house, not a restricted paperwork nightmare. 

No mortgage. No house. Everything ground to a screeching halt. And absolute silence from the Housing Association. 

My conveyancer’s update wasn't exactly reassuring: "The Housing Association’s solicitor is aware of the problem. It is a complicated legal issue. They are investigating, and when I hear anything, I will get back to you. But this is not an easy fix."

One week passed. Then two. Then three. Every time I asked, I got the same copy-pasted refrain: "Not an easy fix." 

This would be easy enough if we had stability in our own housing situation and time to wait this out. But… panic about the court order was setting in. Rumours were flying everywhere about how long an eviction takes to process. Had the judge looked at our file yet? Some said it takes two weeks; others claimed court backlogs were so bad no one would see it until January! The pressure to force this house purchase over the line was becoming suffocating.

Now, there are two fundamental truths you need to know about me:

1. I don't know how anything in the property world works. I had zero clue what a buyer is actually supposed to do here. What is my role?

2. I am an obsessive fixer. I like figuring stuff out, and I will Google something into oblivion until I find an answer, like trying to solve a puzzle.

There had to be a way to fix this disaster. And there was no way on earth I was just going to sit back and wait for someone else to figure it out—mostly because I had a horrible gut feeling that absolutely nobody else was actually looking at it, and wouldn't do for months.

And we were only half way through the month!

To be continued...