Shared Ownership

It's been a year when first-time buyers kept saying yes to shared ownership - and saw their dreams of home ownership come true at a price they could afford.
 
Feedback from buyers has been extremely positive and - at the time of writing - we’ve already come very close to achieving our year-end target of 220 shared ownership sales with a total profit of £1.7million.
 
It’s a terrific result in tough market conditions and, when you add the £1.8million surplus that we’re on target to achieve through 37 open market sales, you can see that we’ll have a combined total of £3.5million to reinvest in building more affordable homes in the coming year.
 
This will help make a huge difference to the lives of many more first-time and other buyers who can't afford to buy on the open market.
 
Buyers like Matt McIntyre and Clare McLaughlin, who purchased a 50%-plus share of their first home at Larks Rise, Coventry - one of our fastest-selling shared ownership developments with well over 30 reservations in a matter of months.
 
Matt and Clare are so pleased with their new home and our part-buy, part-rent deal - also known as shared ownership - that they agreed to feature in a special video explaining how their dreams came true at a price they could afford.
 
Listen to them talking via Bromford's YouTube channel and it helps to understand why we've managed to maintain our proud record of 100% customer approval.
 
This is very much reflected in the conversations we have with customers through Twitter, Facebook and our new-look website.
 
Like the rest of Bromford, we're now making better, more creative use of social media and the web to reach out to customers and to make the most of our reduced spend on sales and marketing.
 
With nearly 24 new developments and 230 new shared ownership homes added to our portfolio during the course of the year, we've worked hard to promote them all well before we accepted handover from the private developer or our in-house construction team.
 
2013  was also a year when almost 40 of open market homebuyers bought a new Bromford home - most of them at Penny Meadow, Kidderminster, and St Mark's View, Cheltenham.
 
These fast-selling flagship developments - delivered on time and on budget by our in-house construction team - demonstrated our ability to compete with private developers for a share of the outright sales market and profits to reinvest in our affordable housing.
 
As the year-end approaches, we're trying another new approach at our latest development - Colliers Green, New Arley, just north of Coventry. It's here that we're offering buyers a choice of TWO affordable ways to buy - equity loan as well as shared ownership.
 
We believe buyers will welcome the choice and look forward to reporting on our progress - and other fresh ideas - next year.