“My life has been on hold for years. There isn’t one person in my block that isn’t exasperated and fed up. We’re all just absolutely exhausted,” says 52-year-old Ian.
Ian has been the owner – partly at least – of a flat in Gaumont House in south London for nearly two decades. He’s wanted to move away since around 2017, but the hospitality worker has not been able to sell his home.
Using shared ownership, Ian first bought a 35 per cent stake in the home from a housing association in 2005, and said initially it seemed like a “wonderful” arrangement.
He initially paid £435 towards the mortgage each month, and an extra £330 per month on rent and service charge.
“After five or six years I started to notice the problems – some windows were rotten in the communal areas and there were leaks. The freeholders were very slow at responding to anything to fix issues. It took months and sometimes years to get a response”.
Problems started to rack up, and he eventually got his MP involved, but things did not get better. He now describes the building his flat is in as a “complete mess” that has “not been kept up at all.”
And in that time, the hospitality worker had not been able to staircase towards owning more of the flat, and his rent and service charge kept increasing.
But Ian says the problem really came to a head in 2017, when he started trying to sell the property, and planned to move out of London.
He says that the developer had not installed fire breaks – which stop fires from spreading – properly, meaning nobody would be able to get a fresh mortgage on it.
Since then, he’s been renting in Malvern, Worcestershire, and has been renting out his shared ownership property with agreement from the housing association with the issues still not resolved.
“I’m essentially an accidental landlord” says Ian.
And he says he is now making a loss on this as well, with the rent, mortgage and service charge combined costing £1,335 per month.
“I had to take out a loan at one point because of the damage. Being a landlord is not something that I ever wanted to be”.
He says he fears his chances of ever becoming an outright property owner are now over, because of his age and how long the problems have dragged on for.
“By the time this is sorted, because I haven’t been able to sell I won’t be able to get a mortgage, because I won’t have enough of my working life left, so I’m stuck because this has taken so long.
“It is likely I will have to continue to rent myself, and will never buy again” he said.
A spokesperson for MTVH, the housing association for Ian’s property, said: “As the residents’ housing association, we are concerned that these fire safety defects have been discovered and want to see them fixed as quickly as possible.
“We are working with the original developer who constructed the building to put this right and residents will not incur any costs associated with these works. Following repeated attempted break-ins and vandalisation, we have recently replaced the main door entry system at Gaumont House helping to smarten up the building and improve its security.”
