BackLatest News and Articles - July 2010
HIPs (Home Information Packs) - Packed Away
The decision to axe HIPS by the new Coalition government has come as no surprise as they were considered to be an expensive burden for sellers and also a hurdle for first-time buyers.
The new Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, explains that “by acting quickly to cut the red tape of HIPS we’ve provided a helping hand to get the housing market on its feet. This is a great time to put your house on the market”.
The Estate Agent Countrywide has indeed reported a fairly immediate 34% rise in the number of people selling their homes.
The trouble we experienced with the HIPS was its confusion. We had to ask “Does the client have a HIP?” “Can we download it?” Are we given a hard copy?” As a buyer “has our client seen it already?” Sometimes if a property took ages to sell the searches would go out of date and then an argument would follow as to who was to foot the bill for the new ones.
The debate remains however, as after a time of reflection and reappraisal the HIPS could actually be quite useful to a lawyer insofar as up-to-date searches were available upfront and it did cut down time delays. They just happened to be launched when the bottom was falling out of the housing market. It did also add a layer of cost to the clients’ conveyancing process.
The conclusion has really been that the net effect of a HIP is that it provided some information and it was probably better to have it than not to have it, but that it didn’t make the process significantly better.
We are now left with the one element of the HIPS, the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) which every property being marketed must have but you do not have to wait for it to market your property. 90% of the time it will be carried out and provided by the Selling Agent, most of who re-trained staff to undertake these when HIPS were first introduced.
It remains to be seen whether the vacuum left by the suspension of HIPS will be filled with anything else.