Oxford City Council is expected to agree a plan to spend £39.7m on purchasing 184 affordable homes at Barton Park from Vistry.
At its next meeting on Wednesday 16 October, the cabinet will consider plans to acquire these homes.
Barton Park, developed by a joint venture consisting of Oxford City Council and Grosvenor, will eventually deliver 885 homes on a 36 hectare site to the north east of the city.
The first phase was completed by Hill in 2020.
Redrow will build a total of 207 new homes as part of the second phase of the project by early next year.
Vistry Group has started building the first of 434 homes under its Countryside brands on the last main phase of the development, which will also include 589m2 of new shops.
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Cabinet is also expected to agree the £33.4m sale of 168 homes completed by the council’s company OX Place to its housing revenue account.
When work to build the first homes at Barton Park started in 2015, government borrowing restrictions meant councils could not use the HRA to fund the building of council homes.
To enable the council to still deliver new homes, it used low-cost borrowing to finance Barton Park’s affordable homes from its general fund. This meant they could not be council housing.
The lifting of borrowing restrictions in 2018 removed this need.
The council has said that “the sale of OX Place homes to the HRA will allow the repayment of loans and allow the housing company to focus on its primary aim – delivering affordable council and shared ownership homes.”
It added that transferring OX Place homes over to the HRA will represent a “significant boost” to the HRA’s asset base of around 7,800 homes, giving it higher income from rent and service charges.
Over time, this will “help the council to do more to improve homes and estates, deliver affordable housing and satisfy other demands like retrofitting older homes to modern energy efficiency standards”, the authority said.
It will also help to reduce the complexity of managing Barton Park, while agreeing to buy future homes directly into the HRA will reduce administrative costs and deliver savings on stamp duty land tax.
Cabinet’s decisions on these matters will need to be ratified at full council on Monday 25 November.