Your guide to the right to buy

What happens next?

Cancellation of Repairs/Improvements

Once you have claim the Right to Buy, your property will be withdrawn from ALL planned and programmed repair/improvement schemes affecting your home. Where we have a statutory obligation to carry out certain repairs to your home (usually those of an emergency nature), this will be met up to the date of completion of the sale.

Letting you know if you have the right to buy your home

Once we have received your application form, we will check the information you provide on your application form against available records in order to establish whether or not the right to buy is appropriate.

We will tell you whether you have the Right to Buy within 4 weeks of the date you applied. (8 weeks are allowed when tenancies claimed with other landlords are needed for the minimum qualifying period).

If we tell you that you do not have the Right to Buy we will give you a reason for this decision.

Valuation/survey of your home

If we admit your Right to Buy, our valuer will contact you to make arrangements for valuation/survey of your property to establish the market value. We will value your property within 5 weeks of the date we receive your Right to Buy application.

If you are buying a flat, a further dilapidation survey will have to done to establish what works, if any are, likely to be required to the common parts of the building within the next five years.

Our offer

We will issue an offer notice telling you the purchase price and other related matters within 8 weeks (12 weeks for flats) of admitting your right to buy.

Your response

You will then have 3 months within which to respond to the our offer by either:

• Withdrawing your right to buy
• Appealing against our valuation
• Accepting our offer

W e provide a form 'Notice of Intention' for your response.

If you do not respond with the 3 month period we will serve a further notice which you will need to respond to within 28 days. If you do not respond the application will be cancelled.

Completion

When we receive your acceptance of our offer we will send the sales particulars to the Council's conveyancers who will prepare the formal instructions for your solicitor.

Unless there is something unusual about the sale, this should take no longer than 5 working days but there will be delays if you do not tell us who your solicitor is. It will then be up to your solicitor to arrange completion as soon as possible. We would normally expect your solicitor to be able to arrange completion of the sale within a further 3 or 4 weeks, although times do vary depending on individual circumstances.

Additional Borrowing

If you are thinking of borrowing extra money to carry out improvements to your property your lender will ask us for a letter or deed of postponement. This is required so that the lender will have first call on any money outstanding on the property if it is sold within the discount repayment period.

We will only issue this if the additional borrowing is for an approved purpose such as home improvements (your solicitor will be able to advise on this). We will charge a fee for issuing a letter or deed of postponement.

Delays

If you feel we are taking too long to deal with your application at any stage of the process, you can serve notice for the outstanding matter to be dealt with by a specific date.

If, on the other land we feel you are taking too long to complete your purchase, we will serve you with a notice to complete requiring you to complete the sale within 56 days or at least state why you are unable to do so within this period. The earliest we can serve this notice is 3 months from the date of the notice of purchase price. If you do not respond to the first notice, we may serve a further notice requiring you to complete the sale within a further period of 56 days, after which your application will be cancelled.