I made the video above several years ago and my view at the time was fairly sceptical. Shared ownership looked attractive because it lowered the barrier to getting onto the property ladder, but once you started adding the rent, service charges, staircasing costs and restrictions, the deal became much less straightforward.

The scheme has changed since then, so simply recycling that argument in 2026 would be lazy. Some of the rules are now more favourable to buyers, some protections have improved and the minimum share on certain homes has fallen significantly. But several of the problems I raised originally haven’t disappeared at all.

The simplest way to understand shared ownership is that you’re buying part of a home and renting the rest. In England you can generally buy between 10% and 75% of a qualifying property’s market value, although the share available depends on the particular home and lease. You can fund your share with a mortgage or savings, and the deposit is usually around 5% to 10% of the share you’re actually purchasing, rather than 5% to 10% of the entire property.

That lower deposit is the scheme’s strongest argument. Take a £300,000 property. Buying it conventionally with a 10% deposit requires £30,000 before you even get into legal fees, surveys and tax. If you bought a 25% shared ownership stake worth £75,000 and needed a 10% deposit on that share, the deposit would be £7,500.

For somebody earning a decent salary but struggling to save tens of thousands of pounds while paying private rent, that difference can be the difference between buying and not buying at all.

Shared ownership solves one affordability problem very well: the deposit. The harder question is what happens to affordability after you move in.

Eligibility is broader than simply being a first-time buyer. In England your household normally needs to earn £80,000 or less, rising to £90,000 in London, and you need to be unable to afford the deposit and mortgage required to buy a suitable home outright. First-time buyers can qualify, but so can some previous homeowners, existing shared owners and people forming a new household after something like a relationship breakdown.

There are also specialist versions. Older Persons Shared Ownership is available from age 55. You can buy up to 75%, and once you reach that point you do not pay rent on the remaining 25%. Home Ownership for people with Long-term Disabilities, usually shortened to HOLD, can help people whose needs are not met by standard shared ownership properties.

So far, so good. The problem is that the phrase “I bought 25% of a house” can create the wrong mental model. You’re not paying 25% of everything.

The rent is the first thing to understand. On new-build shared ownership homes, the maximum starting rent is generally 3% of the landlord’s share, with 2.75% commonly charged. So imagine our £300,000 property again. You buy 25%, leaving the housing provider owning £225,000. At 2.75%, the starting rent on their share would be roughly £6,188 a year, or about £516 a month.

Then you add your mortgage payment. Then potentially the service charge. Then insurance and other costs depending on the lease. The deposit can therefore look extremely affordable while the monthly housing cost tells a different story.

Rent also doesn’t necessarily stay where it started. The rules depend on your lease. Government guidance says leases signed before 12 October 2023 can generally increase by RPI plus 0.5%. For leases signed on or after that date, the lease may instead use CPI plus 1%, although some continue to use the older RPI-based formula. Importantly, the rent generally doesn’t fall just because inflation turns negative.

Service charges are where I’d spend even more time before buying. They can cover things such as communal maintenance, cleaning, lifts, building insurance, management and major works. And despite only owning a share of the property, shared owners normally remain responsible for the service charges specified by their lease.

This isn’t just an internet complaint. Parliament’s 2024 inquiry into shared ownership specifically examined service charges, affordability, staircasing fees and barriers to selling. The government itself acknowledged that future service charges are difficult to stress test because, unlike rent, they aren’t set by a predictable formula.

If I were buying shared ownership today, I wouldn’t just ask what the service charge is. I’d ask what it has been for the last 5 years and what major works are coming next.

There has been some movement here. Under the government’s new Social and Affordable Homes Programme running from 2026 to 2036, Homes England has added guidance specifically aimed at improving the transparency and affordability of service charges on newly funded shared ownership homes. Providers are expected to think about service-charge affordability when designing schemes rather than treating it as somebody else’s problem later.

That is a positive change, but it doesn’t magically reduce charges on the huge stock of shared ownership homes already sitting around the country. If you’re buying a resale, the history of that specific development matters more to you than a policy applying to homes funded under a newer programme.

Another major improvement since my original video is staircasing. Traditionally you had to buy relatively chunky additional shares, which meant saving a large amount of money and potentially paying for valuations, legal work and administration each time. That remains true for many older leases, but the newer shared ownership model is more flexible.

Depending on the lease, standard staircasing can now be available in chunks as small as 5%. Some homes bought under the newer model also allow you to purchase an additional 1% each year for the first 15 years. There is no administration fee for that 1% route, and the value is normally updated using the House Price Index rather than requiring a fresh full valuation every single year.

That matters because the old problem hasn’t changed: when the property rises in value, the share you haven’t bought rises with it.

Imagine a £300,000 home where you initially own 25%. The remaining 75% is worth £225,000. If the whole home later becomes worth £400,000, that same 75% is now worth £300,000. Your existing share has gained value, which is good, but the staircase you were hoping to climb just got £75,000 taller as well.

Standard staircasing can also still involve transaction costs. Government guidance says a RICS valuation is normally required when buying additional shares of 5% or more, and administration fees can be roughly £150 to £500 depending on the provider. Mortgage and legal costs may sit on top. So don’t look at the price of the extra equity in isolation.

The latest official figures also put staircasing into perspective. England recorded 18,603 initial shared ownership sales through large private registered providers and local authorities in 2024-25. Over the same period, 4,781 low-cost home ownership properties were recorded as staircasing all the way to 100%.

Those figures shouldn’t be divided to claim only a certain percentage of buyers ever reach 100%, because they aren’t the same cohort of households. People completing staircasing in 2024-25 may have bought years earlier. But the data does reinforce an important point: getting into shared ownership and eventually owning the entire property are 2 separate financial events.

Repairs have improved under newer leases too. Some new-model shared ownership homes include an initial repair period, usually lasting 10 years while you own less than 100%. During that period the landlord remains responsible for certain structural and external repairs, and qualifying shared owners can claim up to £500 a year towards certain essential repairs inside the property.

Again, check the actual lease. This protection doesn’t apply identically to every shared ownership property in England, particularly older homes and some resales.

Then we get to selling, and this is one of the areas where shared ownership still isn’t as flexible as ordinary home ownership.

If you own less than 100%, you normally tell the housing provider you want to sell. The provider gets a nomination period to try to find another eligible shared ownership buyer. Depending on the lease that period can be 4, 8 or 12 weeks. If they can’t find somebody during that window, you can generally move on to selling your share on the open market.

That doesn’t make a shared ownership property impossible to sell, but you have an extra layer in the process that somebody selling a conventional freehold home doesn’t have. There can also be valuation, legal and provider fees to factor in.

There is another issue that my original video touched on rather clumsily, and it’s worth being precise about it. Shared ownership homes are leasehold, and government guidance currently warns that you may lose your home and the money you’ve put into it if you fail to pay rent or seriously breach the terms of the lease. That is a much more significant risk than simply saying you’re an owner who happened to miss a normal bill.

The government has announced plans to abolish the existing forfeiture system for long residential leases and replace it with a more proportionate enforcement regime, but as of August 2026 that wider reform should not be treated as though the old risk has already vanished. The lease you are actually signing remains the document that matters.

Stamp duty is another area where the old video is now out of date. In England and Northern Ireland, buyers of qualifying shared ownership properties normally have 2 routes. You can make a market value election and calculate SDLT using the value of the entire property, or pay in stages based initially on the share and relevant rent calculation.

If you pay in stages, additional staircasing does not normally trigger further SDLT until your ownership goes above 80%. Once you cross 80%, further rules apply. First-time buyers can also qualify for First Time Buyers’ Relief on qualifying shared ownership purchases, subject to the current conditions and limits.

The other thing I’d change from my original argument is calling shared ownership an “investment”. For most buyers that isn’t really the best way to judge it. This is primarily an affordable home ownership product. The useful comparison isn’t necessarily shared ownership versus buying the perfect property outright, because many people considering the scheme cannot do that yet.

The comparison may actually be shared ownership versus spending another 5 or 10 years privately renting while trying to build a larger deposit.

And in that situation the answer becomes much more personal. If a £7,500 deposit gets you into a stable home years earlier, the service charges are sensible, the lease is clean and your monthly costs are affordable, shared ownership could make complete sense. House price growth on the percentage you own is then almost a bonus rather than the sole reason you bought it.

But if the only reason the property looks affordable is because the advert says “25% share from £75,000”, I’d be very careful. That’s marketing the cheapest number in the transaction rather than the entire financial commitment.

Don’t ask whether you can afford the share. Ask whether you can afford the whole arrangement.

Before buying, I’d want 5 numbers in front of me: the mortgage payment, starting rent, exact rent-review formula, current service charge and service-charge history. Then I’d want to know what happens if mortgage rates are higher when I refinance and whether I could realistically afford to staircase if the property rises 10%, 20% or 30% in value.

I’d also look at the length of the lease. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 expanded lease extension rights, and wider leasehold reform is still moving through government policy in 2026, including plans to move more flats towards commonhold. But potential future reform isn’t a substitute for checking the lease you’re buying today.

The biggest change in my view since making the original video is therefore not that shared ownership suddenly became good or bad. It’s that the newer scheme is more flexible than the version I originally discussed. Smaller initial shares, 1% staircasing on qualifying newer leases and repair support have addressed some genuine weaknesses.

The biggest criticism hasn’t changed though. Shared ownership makes the purchase price easier to reach by splitting ownership, but the costs don’t split nearly as neatly. A buyer needs to judge the mortgage, rent, service charges, lease restrictions and future staircasing together.

If you’re seriously considering shared ownership, the next research I’d do is property-specific rather than scheme-specific. Get the key information document and lease, then compare the last several years of service charges, planned major works, remaining lease length, staircasing rules and resale restrictions. The government’s headline rules tell you how shared ownership works in theory. Those documents tell you what the particular home you’re about to buy will actually cost you.

I’d also model the next 5 years rather than just month 1. Increase the rent using the formula in the lease, test your mortgage payment at a higher refinancing rate and model what another 10% share could cost if the property rises in value. If the numbers still work, shared ownership may genuinely be the bridge into home ownership it is supposed to be. If they only work at today’s best-case assumptions, that is information worth knowing before you sign anything.

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