How Shared Ownership Is Being Sold in a Difficult Leasehold Market

By David Wood · Published 25 August 2026

Nearly 87% of leasehold flats listed in the final quarter of 2025 had still not found a buyer six months later, according to Zoopla analysis reported by the Financial Times in August 2026. For freehold homes, the equivalent figure was approximately 74%. For two-bedroom freehold houses, it was around 69%.

At 31 March 2026, Peabody reported 367 completed sale homes that had been unsold for more than three months. Around 80% of its unsold properties were shared ownership.

Against that background, housing associations are offering buyers thousands of pounds in deposit contributions, cashback and buying-cost support. Some are going further, temporarily paying the service charge, rent or even part of the estimated mortgage bill. There is also at least one documented case where the service charge used in marketing was substantially below a contemporary estimate.

A difficult market for flats

The Zoopla data reported by the Financial Times showed leasehold flats performing materially worse than freehold homes. In several regions, including London, the South East, Wales, the North West, and Yorkshire and the Humber, flats were taking substantially longer to find a buyer than houses.

Leasehold tenure is not the sole explanation. Mortgage rates, affordability pressures, elevated London prices, the withdrawal of buy-to-let landlords, cladding and building-safety issues, lender restrictions and a general weakness in demand for flats all contribute. Some sellers are also maintaining asking prices that are no longer supported by the market.

The reasons for leasehold's underperformance, including the role of service charges and broader leasehold concerns, are examined in the earlier article Leasehold: The Market Is Finally Pricing In The Risk.

Peabody's completed unsold stock

Peabody's results for the year ending 31 March 2026 disclosed the following position on completed homes that had not yet sold:

Peabody stated that around 80% of the properties unsold at year end were shared ownership. Homes unsold for more than six months represented approximately £65 million of estimated sales income. Peabody noted that some of this stock had subsequently been reserved or exchanged.

These figures establish Peabody's sales position from its own published accounts, without any need to infer it from individual advertisements.

A note on comparability: Peabody's 2025 disclosure appears to relate specifically to completed outright-sale homes, while the 2026 disclosure includes substantial shared-ownership stock. The two years' figures are not necessarily comparable as Peabody has not published the precise definition of each.

What Peabody is offering buyers

Peabody is currently or has recently offered prospective purchasers a range of financial incentives across its developments.

These are not the only forms of promotion. Housing providers more broadly have offered mortgage contributions, stamp-duty payments, reservation-fee reductions, furniture packages, cashback, vouchers, competitions, moving-cost assistance and lifestyle incentives. The examples above focus on those with meaningful, documented financial value.

Providers are also using smaller non-financial inducements. Peabody has offered a 12-month family membership to Kew Gardens, a £100 social-media prize draw and a £250 survey prize draw. These are minor beside the deposit contributions and recurring-cost subsidies, but illustrate the breadth of current sales activity.

Peabody is not alone

Several other major housing providers are offering comparable or more extensive incentives on shared-ownership and other leasehold homes. The offers currently in the market fall broadly into three categories, each progressively more revealing about the difficulty providers face in completing sales.

Transaction incentives

The most conventional form of purchaser incentive reduces the upfront cost of buying. A provider contributes towards legal fees, stamp duty or other completion costs. The buyer still pays the full price for the property and assumes the full continuing costs of ownership from day one. These incentives are routine in competitive property markets and straightforwardly understood by lenders.

Riverside, for example, has offered approximately £2,000 cashback on shared-ownership purchases. Guinness has offered £1,000 retail vouchers to prospective purchasers. These sit comfortably within established new-build marketing practice.

Price incentives

A step beyond transaction support, some providers are offering deposit contributions or cashback that reduce the effective cost the buyer pays for their share. The Peabody incentives documented above fall largely into this category, including the deposit contribution at Lombard Square worth up to approximately £5,875.

L&Q has offered larger packages on outright-sale properties, combining stamp-duty contributions, buying-cost contributions and vouchers. These outright-sale packages should not be confused with shared-ownership offers, but they illustrate the competitive pressure in the new-build flat market more broadly.

Recurring-cost incentives

The third category is particularly notable. Some providers are no longer simply helping buyers into the property. They are temporarily paying part of the cost of living there.

On selected shared-ownership properties, L&Q has offered approximately 12 months' service-charge contribution. The service charge does not disappear. The provider pays it for the introductory period, and when that period ends, the buyer assumes the full liability. Where the monthly service charge is known, the cash value is substantial. On a property with a £300 monthly charge, a year's contribution is worth £3,600. On a property at £400 a month, the figure is £4,800.

Any such calculation is this site's own, based on published figures, not L&Q's stated value.

Notting Hill Genesis goes further. At qualifying developments, NHG has offered contributions of approximately £4,776 to £5,082 towards an initial period of rent, service charge and estimated mortgage payments. This is not a subsidy of one element of the buyer's housing cost. It temporarily covers the combined monthly cost of occupying the property: the rent payable to the housing association on the unowned share, the service charge, and an estimate of the mortgage payment on the share the buyer does own. When the contribution is exhausted, the buyer pays all three.

The distinction matters. A provider paying a buyer's legal fees is helping them complete a purchase. A provider temporarily paying the service charge, rent or mortgage is reducing the buyer's actual housing costs during the period most likely to shape the buyer's experience of affordability. The underlying costs remain. They simply begin later.

How much are these offers really worth?

In shared ownership, the buyer purchases a percentage share of the property rather than the whole. The value of the incentive varies according to the percentage of the property being purchased.

A £5,000 incentive may look modest against a £500,000 property, but if the buyer is purchasing only a 25% share for £125,000, the incentive is a 4% reduction in the price of the share they are paying.

No incentive should be described simply as "5 percent off" without specifying what that percentage actually refers to.

Purchaser incentives are not new or improper; they are an established and regulated feature of the new-build housing market, and lenders and valuers require them to be disclosed. A transparent incentive, such as telling a buyer that the service charge is £300 a month but the provider will pay the first twelve months, is a different matter from whether the underlying £300 figure is itself accurate.

The more revealing insight is what kinds of incentives are now being used, and what they tell us about the costs providers believe are deterring buyers. When the incentive moves from covering legal fees to temporarily paying the service charge, the rent and the mortgage, it is an acknowledgement that the monthly cost of occupation is a factor in the purchasing decision.

When the service charge itself enters the sales pitch

The strongest available evidence of a discrepancy between marketed and estimated service-charge figures comes from the Observer's investigation published on 9 March 2025.

The Observer reported that a Peabody shared-ownership property at the Pickle Factory development was marketed with a service charge described as "from £247 a month." Documents examined by the Observer showed an estimated 2024 service charge of £406 a month for a one-bedroom flat, a difference of approximately £159 a month, or around 64% above the advertised figure.

On the same floor, a two-bedroom shared-ownership property was paying approximately £667 per month in 2024/25.

The Observer reported that Peabody said it would review the marketing to ensure it was accurate.

The advertised figure may well have been accurate when first published. But service charges in new developments can move quickly enough to overtake marketing copy. In this case, the £247 figure encountered by prospective purchasers sat alongside a contemporary £406 estimate examined by the Observer.

The Pickle Factory is not an isolated example of rapid movement in service charges. The Observer's investigation documented comparable increases across several housing associations. These cases do not establish that the figures quoted at purchase were inaccurate, but they demonstrate how substantially the continuing liability can change.

At Martel Place (originally One Housing, now Riverside), the Observer reported service charges of approximately £95 per month at purchase in 2017, rising to approximately £706 per month from April 2025. Riverside provided an explanation of the costs to the Observer. At Clarion developments, reported examples included charges increasing from approximately £120 to £390 per month, and from approximately £145 to £372 per month.

These are the kinds of increases that prospective leasehold buyers are now aware of. They provide the context in which every service-charge figure in a sales brochure is read, and in which providers are offering thousands of pounds of incentives to complete purchases.

The owners selling in the opposite direction

While housing associations market newly completed shared-ownership homes with deposit support, cashback and temporary cost subsidies, existing shared owners attempting to sell their interests face the same difficult market from the opposite direction.

Buyers are increasingly alert to the risks attached to leasehold ownership, particularly the possibility that service charges can rise substantially after purchase. That matters because an existing shared owner cannot normally soften those liabilities with the kinds of incentives available to a housing association selling new stock. The rent and service charge shown to the buyer are part of the ongoing cost of the property, not an introductory cost that can be temporarily absorbed by an institutional marketing budget.

A preliminary sample of approximately 30 Peabody shared-ownership resale listings found:²

The contrast with newly completed stock is structural. A housing association selling a new shared-ownership home can use its marketing budget to offer thousands of pounds in cashback, deposit contributions or temporary subsidies of the service charge, rent and mortgage. Those incentives can reduce the buyer's initial cost of ownership even though the underlying liabilities remain. An existing shared owner trying to leave the tenure generally has no equivalent resource. They are selling the property together with the rent and service-charge liabilities that currently attach to it. A buyer comparing the two may therefore see a new home accompanied by several thousand pounds of financial support and a resale where the continuing costs are visible from the outset.

The Pickle Factory example raises a separate issue: whether the service-charge figure presented during a sale reflects the most current estimate available. The evidence does not establish how common such discrepancies are, but it shows why the accuracy of that figure matters.

The result is an uneven sales environment. New shared-ownership stock can be supported by institutional incentives designed to reduce the buyer's immediate financial burden. Existing shared owners seeking to sell compete for the same purchasers without access to equivalent institutional support.

The continuing liability

Housing associations are not merely discounting the transaction costs of buying. In some cases they are temporarily subsidising the monthly costs attached to the home itself. That distinction matters particularly in shared ownership, because existing owners trying to sell must market homes carrying those continuing liabilities into the same difficult flat market.

Those incentives expire. The rent and service charge do not.