LEGAL


HIPs – don’t look back in anger


On the anniversary of the ditching of the Home Information Packs, legal expert Graham Dorman remembers the good points.


I


t is a year now since the suspension of Home Information Packs was announced by the Coalition Government. HIPs were introduced in England and Wales on 1st August 2008 but suspended by the new Government from 21 May 2010, apart for the


requirement for sellers to produce an Energy Performance Certificate. Conceived as the ideal vehicle for smoothing our congested and complex conveyancing process, the reality was a scheme so watered down by practical constraints that HIPs degenerated into an expensive hurdle for sellers and an irrelevance to buyers. Devil’s Advocates in the industry do


agree, however, that some aspects of HIPs were actually quite helpful in making the market run more efficiently. These were the elements that forced Sellers to focus on what Buyers would be looking for and enquiring about, thus making sure that those issues were addressed well in


36 JUNE 2011 PROPERTYdrum


Devil’s advocates agree that some aspects of HIPs were actually quite helpful.


advance of any substantive transaction. The failure of HIPs was unsurprising,


falling as it did between several stools. Some of the HIPs regulations were undoubtedly onerous and simply increased sellers’ costs with little discernable benefit. It is also true to say that the content of many HIPs left important questions unanswered, thereby failing to provide the


initial boost of information to a buyer that the legislators hoped would speed up the conveyancing process. Indeed, the complexities of the home


buying process are such that the system cannot be uniformly speeded up, as property professionals have long been pointing out. If a buyer and a seller are both fully committed and finance is in place, a property sale can be very swift. More often than not, however, the personal agendas of the buyer and the seller, delays in property chains and the currently experienced problems in securing mortgage offers get in the way of otherwise achievable time frames. In a housing market shaken by the


economic downturn and the defensive positions adopted by mortgage providers, sellers now need to work much harder than they did previously to attract and reassure buyers and pre-empt the problems that so often derail a transaction.


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