JMS Trust

JMS Supported Living Trust is a registered charity in England and Wales, number: 1179606.

  1. Advice
  2. Finding a property

Finding a property

Finding a property is one of the ‘big steps’ in setting up your own supported living. It was often why groups ended up contacting JMS Trust in the first place. These challenges pushed us to change from our initial offer of only funding to renovate to piloting purchasing some properties for groups where there was very little available locally.

Across the projects there are a range of approaches to finding a property.

The Croft

Typically our projects involved:

  • A family owning the property and renting it to all the tenants, often through a housing association.
  • A charity or housing association owning the property.

We also know some projects, that were not supported by JMS Trust, where the property is privately rented or people have considered shared ownership through a HOLD model.

The key considerations when looking for a property were:

  • The location
    • People wanted to be near their families, somewhere that felt safe with good transport and access to local facilities and activities.
  • Long term access and sustainability
    • Most of our projects have wanted to set up a ‘home for life’ for their young people. They’ve looked for properties that will meet their long-term access needs.
  • Space and design
    • Groups have shared a similar approach in looking for properties where everyone can have a good-sized bedroom allowing privacy and good social space. Being able to be together and separate in the house supports everyone to maintain positive relationships with each other. Communal space was important to all of the groups to encourage people to spend time outside of their rooms. This was often missing from housing the local authority was offering.
Person in wheelchair in their garden
"We looked at other properties that we thought might have worked but now we have this I'm not sure they would have. The important things were about location space having three bedrooms and parking and space for a dog."

We tried all different housing models. Originally our daughters were privately renting but we worried about how secure that was into the future and the rent was rising year on year. We tried looking for a shared ownership property but there was very few options in good locations, and we could see issues with accessibility becoming important in the near future.

Resources

Learning Disability England

has an accessible housing guide

My Safe Home

supports disabled people to access home ownership through HOLD. They are happy to answer questions about HOLD and support you through the process of accessing buying a house.