Breaking Property News – 17/06/24
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Clarion Housing & Places for People partner with Stairpay
Press Release – London, UK – 17 June 2024 — Stairpay, a platform that simplifies the customer journey of shared ownership to help more people achieve their dream of owning a home, has partnered with Clarion Housing and leading social enterprise Places for People, which together manage more than 365,000 homes.
The startup, which is driving innovation in shared ownership by automating staircasing — the process of gradually building towards 100% home ownership — has also signed a deal with Share to Buy, the largest property portal for shared ownership, to facilitate automatic listing of shared ownership properties for sale.
The partnerships will leverage Stairpay’s data-driven insights to enhance and simplify the shared ownership experience for residents using the part-buy, part-rent scheme designed to make housing more affordable.
It recently completed a successful two-month pilot with Clarion, the UK’s largest housing association, which saw a 50% increase in staircasing transactions and strong resident engagement with the app.
The UK faces a significant gap between renters and affordable properties. While 8.5 million people currently rent, only 20,000 shared ownership properties became available in 2021-22. The end of the Help to Buy scheme in 2022, which enabled the purchase of almost 390,000 new build homes, has also created a supply void. Consequently, the number of first-time buyers dropped to a 10-year low of 293,000 last year, highlighting the need for innovative solutions.
The platform addresses the affordability challenges in shared ownership by automating staircasing and the resales process for both residents and housing associations. It allows prospective shared owners to understand the long-term financial implications of being a shared owner, helps them to staircase faster.
Floris ten Nijenhuis, Founder said: “Stairpay was born out of the desire to solve the challenges faced by first-time buyers looking to get onto the property ladder. The UK has the largest shared ownership market globally, but has challenges to address. Our partnerships with Places for People, Clarion and Share to Buy signify the collective intent to apply a data-driven approach to significantly improve the shared ownership experience for both residents, housing associations and other stakeholders which will see more people realise their dream of full home ownership.”
Introduced last year by Homes England, the 1% micro-staircasing option has raised concerns among housing associations due to the additional administrative burden of having to provide HPI valuations on request to customers.
Stairpay, which is grant-funded by HM Land Registry offers a fully automated self-serve solution for 1% staircasing. It allows eligible residents and housing associations to receive an official (House Price Index) HPI valuation via a live feed to the Land Registry as well as automating the legal documents and payments flow.
With the first eligible residents on the new Homes England lease moving into their Shared Ownership home in recent months, Places for People is looking to partner with Stairpay as part of its programme to adopt modern technology and provide best-in-class customer service. The technology will be available for Places for People’s shared ownership customers on the new Homes England lease initially.
Michelle Wood, Director of Home Ownership for Places for People, said: “As an organisation our ultimate goal is to ensure everyone has somewhere to call home. Shared ownership is a great way of supporting people into home ownership in a way that works best for them and we are committed to doing all we can to help them throughout the process of owning more, and eventually all, of their home as soon as possible.
“So, we are excited to implement Stairpay’s technology to make the process of buying more equity in their home a more streamlined and automated process which we hope and believe will lead to more of our customers buying more equity in their property.”
The company has raised £650k in pre-Seed funding led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Heartfelt Ventures, and prominent angel investors such as Rob Hamilton, who built and sold Instant Offices to private equity house MML Capital, prolific proptech specialist Luke Appleby, and Paul Kempe of City and Provincial Properties. This latest funding will be used to further develop the platform and onboard more housing associations.
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
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