Home ownership
Over the past year, we’ve been working hard to improve how we support customers looking to sell their home or become a shared owner.
New homes built
“Great help! Gave me information, kept me up to date, and the case handler was a great benefit. Thank you for helping me along my journey of buying my house!”
Annamarie, Stonewater customer
Handbooks designed for you
From listening to your feedback and reviewing the most common complaints and queries to our teams, we saw a need for clearer information about homeownership.
To help, we created two brand-new handbooks to help you feel more informed and better understand your rights, responsibilities, and options.
These guides, full of useful advice for both new and existing customers, including first-time buyers and those who have owned before, were designed to take the mystery out of leasehold living and help you feel more confident in managing your home. We give them to all new customers and signpost to existing customers, as part of our wider plan to help make information clearer, more helpful, and easier to find.
Check out our leasehold handbook here.
Our shared ownership and retirement living handbooks will be available on our website shortly - stay tuned!
A new home for information
Through surveys and feedback, you told us that you’d like to be able to find information more easily. We listened and moved the information for homeowners onto our website, making sure it was up-to-date, useful, and much easier to find and explore.
We also introduced a new system for our teams to help us work more smoothly and stay better connected. We hope that this will help us to provide a faster and more reliable experience for you.
“Linda was absolutely fantastic, so helpful and always responded in a timely manner with all the information we required.”
Harriet, Stonewater customer
Supporting shared owners and leaseholders
We know that being a shared owner or a leaseholder can feel complicated at times, so we made it a priority to strengthen our knowledge sharing and improve the support we give you.
This year:
- We partnered with the National Leasehold Group and the National House Building Council (NHBC) to deliver in-depth training for our teams so we can give you better advice.
- We reviewed how we support you when a managing agent is involved, putting a new process in place to help resolve issues more effectively.
- 314 households found their new home through our shared ownership scheme.
- 83 customers staircased to 100% ownership – either through direct sales or by gradually buying more of their home!
- And we continued to listen to you. Results from our shared ownership survey, carried out in March/April, told us that most customers found our shared ownership policy to be clear and fair, though experiences with applying for a home and communication varied. We’re using your feedback to make our service better!
We’re proud to be one of the first organisations to test the new Shared Ownership Code, an effort to create clear, consistent standards and better protection for customers who own their home through shared ownership.
We helped the Shared Ownership Council understand how it could work in practice and what it might mean for the sector and you.
Working with you to make things better
We checked our leases and policies to make sure they‘re current, reflect how customers use their homes in modern times, ensuring communities can thrive together and follow the rules.
Thanks to your feedback, we made some changes! We invited customers to help review these updates, and a group came together to share ideas and create a 12-month plan to make things better. They’ll keep meeting over the next year to help us stay on track.
We also met with our Scrutiny Panel – a group of real customers – to share our Home Ownership Improvement Plan. We explained why we’re making these changes, what we’ve done so far, and what’s coming up next.
“As an engaged customer, I was asked to review the draft homeowners’ information pack. I’ve been part of several customer groups and realised that new shared ownership customers sometimes had problems because they were not fully aware of their rights and responsibilities.
I suggested that prospective homeowners should be encouraged to go through all the necessary paperwork with their legal advisor before signing a contract.
This advice is now included in the information pack. I’m really pleased my suggestion has led to this, and I hope homeowners will have fewer problems as a result of this change.
Stonewater really listens to customers’ views, and it’s so good to feel I have made a difference!”
Pat, Scrutiny and Inclusion group member