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HIPs Godsend Or Blow For Home Sales UK Market?

December 30, 2008

In the UK, if I want to Sell My House from now on, I have to commission, pay for & wait for a HIPs Report on my house. HIP stands for House Information Pack, and in future, any Estate Agent who advertises or endeavours to sell a house without a completely completed HIP report is liable to fines up to ?200 per event.

Ministers insist that a House Information Pack actually quickens the procedure you go through to Sell Your House. They say this is because all the questions which Home Buyers had to search to answer before, will now be answered “up front” in the HIP. The government claims to have surveyed some 16,000 House sales, and point to the fact that on average, you sell your home 6 days faster when you have a HIP.

However, critics of the plan say that it can take up to 30 days from ordering your HIP Report to actually receiving it. In addition, it costs on average around ?300 for the standard house. The overall effect of the up front ?300 cost, plus the 30 day wait for the report to be completed more than outbalance the 6 days reduction in the necessary process to Sell Your House.

It’s important to remember that the process to Sell Your House, as measured by the government, doesn’t begin until a potential home buyer has made an offer which is acceptable to the vendor. On the other hand, if you decide today that you want to sell your house, you have a wait of up to 30 days before an Estate Agent can even begin to put your house on the market. Then begins the long process of finding a potential Home Buyer. This can take lots of weeks, or in the present credit crunch, even months or years.

Therefore, when you take the entire procedure into account, it looks like all the government have achieved is to place a considerable obstacle in your way if you want to Sell Your House. The obstacle hurts the market in two ways. Firstly it dramatically lengthens the time taken to get a house on the market, and secondly, for families on a small budget, there’s the problem of allocating around ?300 just to get the report completed.

Critics of the plan say that it’s particularly irritating because it works against all the expensive schemes the government have recently introduced in order to prevent House sales UK going into an even quicker decline. Indeed, until news of this latest plan broke, there were very believable signs that the Falls in house values were slowing down noticeably.

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