GHA "enormously proud" of partial ownership scheme so far

Tuesday 12 June 2018

More partial ownership homes are being planned by the Guernsey Housing Association, its Chief Executive has said, after its newest set of properties at the former Warry's bakery site have been unveiled.

Steve Williams said this year they have already started work on two developments which contained a number of partial ownership properties: the Vier Jardin which should be ready for 2019 and the Courtil Reveaux which is set for November.

The GHA also has homes at Baubigny and Saltpans Road ready for next year, and St Saviour's, St Martin's and St Peter Port planned for 2020. They will all add to 14 properties added in 2017, and then a further 39 in 2018.

Mr Williams was giving the update following the unveiling of the new set of houses at the former Warry's bakery site in the Grand Bouet, which are part of the partial ownership scheme. Partial Ownership is a form of tenure that allows first time buyers to purchase between 40 and 80% of a home, with the remaining equity being held by the GHA and rented to the occupant at a discounted rate.

"At this time there are approximately 80 people on the waiting list and the length of wait depends on the type of property preferred; for example we have 31 people on the waiting list for a one-bed property," he said.

"As new homes are built and current residents in partially owned homes move on to the local market, these homes then get allocated to those on the waiting list.

"The number of people on the waiting has dropped recently thanks to some new developments so the number is low relative to previous years. However, we really want people to join the waiting list if they have a need for partial ownership housing as this gives us a picture of the demand in the island and we can then plan our new developments more strategically.”

Yesterday new guidelines for a future Housing strategy were unveiled by the Environment & Infrastructure Committee, which drew from a report carried out by KPMG and put together a set of work streams that would need to be completed for the strategy to be put together.

It advised that the Committee did not think a second partial ownership scheme was necessary or would lead to improvements for first time buyers.

But Mr Williams said the GHA was really pleased with the scheme, and with all of the properties they had produced for it.

"The scheme has given hundreds of islanders the chance to get on the housing ladder when they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to, so we’re enormously proud of that," he said.

"The scheme works well at the moment but for it to continue to work we need to know the real demand in the island for partial ownership housing, we’d therefore encourage people to join our waiting list. This will give us a picture of what kind of housing the island will need in the future; be it one, two or three-bedroom homes, rented accommodation or extra-care flats.”

He added that the number of homes added is dependent largely on the waiting list and supply of land.

Currently, there are 212 partial ownership homes on the GHA's books - almost a quarter of its total homes are part of the scheme.