Shared ownership: rent and service charges

Your service charge payments will vary, depending on where you live and your lease agreement. To see how your own charge is broken down, please select from the following options:

I live in a house:

• with no estate payments
• on an estate managed by a Managing Agent
• on an estate managed by Sage

I live in a flat:

• in a Sage building on a Sage estate
• in a Sage building on an estate managed by a Managing Agent
• in a building and estate managed by a Managing Agent

We provide a service charge estimate at the end of each February, laying out what we believe it will cost to deliver your services from April that year to March the following year. You then pay this estimated amount monthly for the next 12 months. By paying small, regular amounts, you get the services you need without having to pay a huge one-off cost at the end of the year.

In the September of the following year, we check our estimate against the actual cost. If the cost is less than estimated, you'll get a credit on your rent account. If it's more than estimated, we - or your Managing Agent if you have one - will send you a debit note, asking you to pay the difference. We work hard to make sure your estimate is as accurate as possible and you’ll only ever pay the actual costs incurred as we never profit through service charges. 

• If you paid £20 a month from April 2023 to March 2024, and then we found the actual cost was £18 a month, we would contact you in September 2024 to credit you £24 (£2 a month). 

What's shared ownership rent for and how is it calculated?

We call it rent to clearly set it apart from your mortgage interest payments and it works in a very similar way. You've borrowed money from Sage to pay for some of your home but the interest rate on that loan is protected by regulation to limit the initial rate and how much it can increase by each year. This makes it different from the interest rate on a mortgage or rent increases that you might have experienced in the private rented market. 

When you rent in the private market, your landlord can choose what increase they apply to your rent. With shared ownership, all rent starts out at 2.75% and you have the certainty that you own your home and that your rent will only increase in line with the terms of your lease.

Annual rent increases
The rent you pay increases annually in April by a contractual amount, protecting you from uncontrolled changes. It will increase by one of these: 

> The Retail Price Index (RPI) of the most recent November + 0.5%

>  The RPI of the most recent September + 1%

> The Consumer Price Index (CPI) of the most recent September + 1%. 

You can find out which one applies to you by checking your lease.