Selling your shared equity home

When you want to move from your shared-equity home, you can sell the percentage of the property you own. We will still keep our share of the property. We do what we can to help you through the process of selling your home, but you could come up against the same problems anyone selling their home has. You will have to pay any legal costs and costs of selling your home, including estate agent’s fees.

If you want to sell your home, the first thing you need to do is to look at your S106 agreement. This sets out who can buy your home and the procedure you need to follow.  

You will need to have your home valued by a qualified RICS (Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors) valuer. You can ask us to do the valuation and we will charge you £150 for this. We cannot refund this if you later decide not to sell your home. The valuation will be valid for three months.

The valuation specifies the full market value of your home. From this we can work out what price you can sell your home for. We work out the price using a formula which takes account of any increase or reduction in valuation since the property was first sold as a shared-equity home (the original affordable price).

For example:
If the original affordable price was £73,200 and the valuation was £120,000, you originally bought 61% of the property. When you come to sell your home, you can sell your 61% of the property. However, the market value of your property may have increased or fallen since you bought it.

Once you know how much you can sell your share of the home for, and have decided that you want to go ahead with selling, you need to let us know before you can formally put your home up for sale. You will need an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) for your home. If you home is less than 10 years old, it may already have one. If your home does not have an EPC, you will need to arrange for an assessor to provide one.

We have a register of people who want to buy a shared-equity home. We can email people on the register to see if any of them would be interested in buying your home. This is a free service and we can do this for a few weeks before you choose an estate agent. Anyone wanting to buy must:

• be able to show that they can get a mortgage and have money for a deposit and legal fees;
• have a total household income (before tax) of less than one third of the market value of the property;
• live in, or work full-time in, Carmarthenshire, or have a long-standing local connection to Carmarthenshire (such as immediate family living in the area); and
• not own or have an interest in any other home, unless they need to move due to a relationship breakdown.

You will need to advertise your home for sale for three months. If, after this period, nobody has agreed to buy your home, for the next period (usually two months) we or a housing association have the option to buy your home. During this time you should still keep your property on the market. You should check your section 106 agreement as the timeframes in it may be different from the ones we have quoted here.

If any person wants to buy your property, they must meet the eligibility criteria. We can check this for you if you're not sure whether your buyer is eligible.

After the time specified in your S106 agreement, if you can show us evidence that you have had the property on the market for the full period but that no one has come forward to buy, you can sell it to anyone and they would not have to meet the eligibility criteria. However, any buyer will need to know that the property is an affordable home and that we will own a share of it. If the buyer wants to rent the home out, it must be at an affordable rent and to an eligible person.

Request a copy of  S106 I'd like to sell my Shared Equity Home