Back in 1991 we bought a house with no deposit (I was just out of uni so had little in savings), with an "equity share scheme" from the builder.sounds to me there's no easy way of purchasing a property other than saving hard for a decent sized deposit
We bought 80% of the property with a mortgage.
The builders owned the other 20% and we would have to buy that off them within 5 years for 20% of the value (min was the purchase price).
Unfortunately house prices went down.
We were both working so we saved up and paid off the charge (in fact we negotiated a 9% discount for paying early) but we would not have been able to put it on the mortgage as the house price had fallen by over 1/3rd (from £70K in 1991 to £45K in 1996).
We could have been in a much worse position and some people were. Some people needed to relocate for work but couldn't take on the money they owed.
When I see all these schemes coming out I do wonder whether we are in for a correction in property prices when the public sector cuts kick in.
I think this is a sign that builders/bank are trying to keep the market going when ultimately continually rising house prices is unsustainable.