The Government has confirmed that Home Information Packs (HIPS) will become compulsory from 1 June 2007. From that date, anyone selling a property must provide potential buyers with a set of documents with information including energy efficiency, searches and evidence of title.
The original proposal included a requirement for a Home Condition Report but the Government seems to have accepted that this is a waste of time and money – they did not put it quite like that, but its failure to persuade mortgage lenders to accept a Home Condition Report as a substitute for a mortgage survey forced Ministers to back down.
HIPS will now include a number of “required” documents and some”authorised” ones. The Home Condition Report is merely “authorised”. The Government still apparently believes that they are “likely to prove valuable to both buyers and sellers” and hopes to encourage an active take-up.
Our own view is that the “required” documents are either ones which any competent conveyancing solicitor would always have insisted upon, or are a waste of time and money. As with everything else we do, we will work to keep both time and expense to a minimum.
There is a list of the required documents in our web site page on HIPS as well as various articles on buying and selling properties which can be found from our property articles index.
Please do not hesitate to contact Felix Appelbe on 020 7242 7000 if you want to discuss any aspect of buying or selling property.
June 8, 2007 at 12:28 pm |
[...] We put up a post here on 2 March reporting the government’s confirmation that Home Information Packs would become [...]
June 13, 2007 at 9:19 am |
“The big change in plans, which some have not noticed, is Ms Kelly’s admission that homeowners will be allowed to put their homes on sale without actually having a completed HIP to hand”.
Chris
http://homeinformationpack.wordpress.com/
June 13, 2007 at 4:15 pm |
What you say is quite right. Ms Kelly’s statement on this, though, was:
“Until the end of the year, we will allow people to market their properties as soon as they have commissioned a pack – rather than making them wait until they have received them”
.. so it was both a temporary relief and one which merely postpones the obligation, since one assumes that a report which has been commissioned will have to be paid for. Whilst you do not, for now, have to wait to receive the thing, you must still incur the expense of it.