Existing Sovereign shared owners | Your property partner

From moving in to moving on, our sales, marketing and home ownership teams are here to help you with every part of owning your home.

Home improvements

You’ll want to make your home just right for you – and that might mean carrying out home improvements such as a new kitchen or bathroom, or even an extension.

Before you start any work, you may need written approval from us, and in some cases from your mortgage lender. So before you get started, drop an email to our Home Ownership team who can advise on the next steps. You may also need planning permission and building regulations approvals.

For lighter improvements like painting, redecorating and hanging shelves, you’re free to be as creative as you like!

Buying more shares

Once you’ve settled in to your new home and you’ve made it your own, you may want to consider buying more shares – this is also known as staircasing.

The more shares in your home that you own, the less rent you pay. Almost all of our homes can be purchased outright, meaning that you could own 100% of your home. You’ll be able to find out whether this is possible for your home in your lease or by chatting to our dedicated staircasing team.

When you do decide the time is right to buy more shares our staircasing team will be able to guide you through the process.

Owning a bigger proportion of your shared ownership home – or even owning all of it – comes with many benefits:

The more shares you own, the less rent you pay – if you own 100% of your home, you’ll pay no rent.
If you decide to staircase to 100% and own the property outright, you can sell your home using an estate agent on the open market.
When it’s time to sell your home, the more shares you own, the more profit you could make if the value of your home has increased.

For more information on buying more shares, click here.

Selling your home

When the time is right for you to move on, our dedicated resales team are here to help you through the process of selling your home.

We’ll usually have eight weeks to find a buyer for you first – and if we haven’t found one after this time, you can choose to sell your home on the open market with your preferred estate agent.

Remember, if you’ve staircased to 100% you can sell your home through an estate agent of your choice whenever you decide.

For more information on the steps to selling your home click here.

Professional photos and property floor plans

When you come to sell your property, you’ll need to provide us with photos of your home. We appreciate this can be a challenging task, that's why we’ve partnered with NicheCom, one of the UK’s leading Estate Agency Marketing Services.

They can provide professional photos and floor plans to support the sale of your home for £115.00 plus VAT. This is paid to NicheCom directly, but we’ll deduct this amount from our administration fee, payable on the completion of sale.

Benefits of this service include:

High quality, professional photos which showcase your home, attracting more prospective buyers
Photos provided in the correct format, first time, speeding up the listing process on our website
Floor plans provide key information to buyers
You can transfer the photos and floor plans to our preferred agent if we’re unsuccessful in finding a purchaser – removing the need for more photos to be taken

You can also arrange for an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) to be produced along with the professional photos and floor plan, ensuring minimal disruption to your schedule. This is an additional service and the cost for an EPC, photographs, and a floor plan is £150.00 plus VAT.

What they say:
We have 30 years’ experience, employ over 120 photographers, and are confident that we are best in class when it comes to producing beautiful property photography and floor plans. All our photographers are members of the Royal Photographic Society and are trained to deliver the very best in property marketing to amplify your property to attract potential buyers.

If you want to take advantage of this great service please let us know. We’ll share your details with NicheCom who will contact you to arrange payment and book a date and time that's convenient for you.

Further guidance to prepare a property to achieve great photos can be found here.

Preferred Agents

As part of the Shared Ownership lease, Sovereign have a 4 week nomination period during which we have exclusive rights to help you find a buyer. We are well placed to arrange the sale of your home and in over 70% of sales last year we were able to find a buyer within our 4 week nomination period. On occasions where we can’t find a buyer you have the option of going with an estate agent of your choice, though we still will be required to approve the purchase of any home in which we own a share.

Not all estate agents are familiar with Shared Ownership, and we’d encourage you to use an agent experienced in these types of sales and understand the guidelines we must follow when approving potential purchaser. Choosing an agent with less experience could delay or even collapse the sale of your home.

To help you find the right agent we’ve partnered with SOWN, a specialist division of Leaders Romans Group that focus exclusively on Shared Ownership sales. They have great experience with Shared Ownership and understand the affordability guidelines and local connection requirements we must consider when approving purchasers.