Dear Monica,
My wife and i seem to have a very similar situation to you. We have been accepted for a new build 3 bed house with a housing association and have our own property to sell which we have found a buyer for and should go through in the next month or so. We need a mortgage for our share of the shared pwnership property and after we have started the process a couple of weeks ago we are finding our credit files to be hindering us. I have previously satisfied CCJ's and defaults and a new default dated 2 months ago we have settled this month. It appears that because there is anything negative on the credit file no one will take us on for a mortgage. We know items sit on your file for 6 years and it appears to make no difference whether things are settled or not; the word default shows so puts creditors off.
I have a couple of friends who work as mortgage advisors for estate agents and they have said not to panic as part of it is the current credit crunch and housing market. We were advised that this time last year there were around 69,000 different mortgage products available and today there are around 17,000, of which none will offer 100% value, 4 will offer 95%, and evidently very few will touch shared ownership. We didn't have any idea when applying for shared ownership it would be so hard to get a mortgage, apparently the reason lenders don't want to is because they give you money to buy a portion of a property the landlord of which can ask you to leave of you break the tenancy aggreement making it very difficult to recover their money (i.e. a usual reposession). So much for affordable housing schemes - thanks Gordon Brown!!!
As you state hindsight is a wonderful thing, we should have nipped the default in the bud. My wife doesn't work as she left when our daughter was born two years ago and she is due to give birth again in 5 weeks time. The default was due to missed payments and we weren't aware it had gone to default until we applied for a copy of our credit file as advised by the mortgage advisor. We are hoping there will be a company somewhere who accepts this situation and are keeping our heads high! Please come back to us if you progress any further as will we.
Good luck
Barrie