Accent Housing has launched its new sales brand as part of the organisation’s renewed development ambitions following the issue of its record breaking £350 million bond in July last year.
Homemade brings together all of Accent Housing’s sales activities and will market new and pre-owned shared ownership homes, manage the sales of further shares in shared ownership homes, and promote and market the association’s outright property sales.
The housing association, which has provided social housing for over 50 years, also currently manages around 3,000 shared ownership and leasehold homes across the country.
Promoting shared ownership as a real choice
Sales director, Rob Bloom who manages the Homemade brand said “With the low-cost home ownership options we are offering, people will have a real opportunity to own a home close to family, friends and work they may otherwise have not been able to afford.
“With Homemade, we can promote shared ownership as a real housing choice. Many people have not considered shared ownership for a number of reasons. We want to show how it can be a real alternative for people who cannot afford to buy a home on the open market but are not in enough ‘need’ to be considered for affordable rented housing.
“The vision of our new service offer, and the financial capacity secured from Accent Housing’s £350 million bond, means we can fulfil our commitment to our residents by providing safe and secure homes for both sale and rent. We will provide a first-class customer experience and we will contribute to fixing the housing crisis by developing many more new homes, providing more opportunities and more choice.”
Demand outstripping supply
In many areas where Accent Housing provides homes, demand can regularly outstrip supply by as much as 6/1 and property prices, particularly in the East and South, can well be in excess of £300,000.
“Thankfully, for many people, there is another affordable route to becoming a homeowner, and that is shared ownership,” said Bloom. “We want to promote the benefits of this help to buy scheme. Our homes offer affordability and long-term security. Homemade is going to help make buying a shared ownership home easy and enjoyable for our customers by continually looking to improve the customer experience and by investing in new technologies.”
Accent Housing’s executive director of development & growth, Sarah Ireland said: “We are committed to helping to fix the housing crisis. We build new homes that are affordable because, in our country, there is a deficit of homes that people can afford to live in. There is huge housing need across a range of tenures and price points across many of the areas and communities that we already work in. We want to help address that issue and provide quality, affordable homes.
We are also committed to improving our existing homes and it is a key area of focus in our development and growth strategy. Surpluses generated from the sale of new homes will be reinvested back into Accent, for future developments and for improving the quality of the association’s existing homes.”
Accent Housing is currently developing new homes in Bradford, West Yorkshire, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, Huntingdonshire, Milton Keynes and Bedford, and has just completed a new development in the village of Fulbourn in South Cambridgeshire.