A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It clearly won’t solve all problems when it comes to buying a house, but a housing association in the North of England has come up with a clever idea that is at least worth a shot.

They call it ‘sweat equity’ and the idea is that you can get £10,000 off the mortgage on your new house – by mucking in to help build them.

In this particular case in Wigan – a city of over 100,000 people between Manchester and Liverpool – the new homeowners didn’t have to work on their own homes; instead they laboured, landscaped, painted and decorated the adjoining St William’s Church and Presbytery site to get the reduction.

The deal was you contributed 500 hours of labour to get £10,000 off your deposit, thanks to a little bit of lateral thinking on the part of Prima Housing Association and a charity called Housing People Building Communities.

You don’t have to even do all the work yourself, but you must be part of it. So you could get your brothers or sisters, parents, uncles, aunts, friends on board – whoever can help you get onto the property ladder.

To be clear, this wasn’t exactly a commercial housing development; a housing association and a charity were involved, and the end result is a shared-ownership scheme.

But what’s wrong with the principle?

Saving ten grand won’t make much of a dent given the price of houses here these days – but the hardest thing for those trying to take that first step is to come up with the ten per cent deposit.

Every year they fall further behind because they’re paying exorbitant rent already, and the chance of saving the price of a pint – let alone a deposit for their own home – grows more remote by the month.

This way they get a break financially, and the construction companies, who are constantly telling us they cannot get labourers, get a delivery of general operatives for the donkey work at the beginning – or the painting, decorating and landscaping at the other end.

Of course not everyone is able to carry out physical labour, but the Wigan scheme took that into account too. Those people were allowed to work their hours on admin or clerical work – all saving the builders money, while saving themselves.