Moving on and moving up: The experience of households who resell public sector dwellings

Abstract
The long‐term consequences of the sale of public sector dwellings to sitting tenants are under‐researched; in particular, the experience of tenant purchasers in the housing market subsequent to purchase is little known. This paper reports research designed to fill this gap in knowledge. Over 200 tenants who had bought their dwelling from the Scottish Special Housing Association and subsequently resold on the open market were traced using the Register fo Sasines and the Land Register and interviewed. Most had made considerable capital gains on resale and had used some of the realised capital to trade up in the housing market. They were, on average, slightly more affluent and younger than sitting tenant purchasers generally; they represented a group of households who were privileged within the public sector through living as tenants in the best stock and who were enabled by the Right to Buy to convert that good luck into hard cash and move into mainstream owner occupation. This good luck compounded the advantaged position vis‐à‐vis other tenants that they enjoyed in the labour market.

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