With a few exceptions, it is now illegal to start marketing a house or flat with more than three bedrooms without having first commissioned a Home Information Pack (HIP).
The government’s intention is that HIPs will speed up the home buying and selling process by providing all the necessary legal documents at the start of the process when marketing starts. It recently abandoned a requirement making HIPs mandatory for all residential sales, at least for the time being.
The required documents that must be included in each HIP are:
Other authorised documents can also be included, such as guarantees and warranties or other searches.
HIPs contain a large amount of complex, legal information and solicitors are best placed to prepare and interpret these packs. With the exception of the EPC and Home Condition Report, the pack’s contents are simple or documents that we have always needed to produce in connection with house transactions.
We believe we shall be able to obtain EPCs and Home Condition Reports (when ordered) promptly from local energy assessors.
At Windeatts, we also offer the Law Society Home Information Pack. This may be a suitable alternative if you wish to delay payment or if we find that we cannot source an EPC quickly. The Law Society packs are likely to be more expensive as effectively we shall be using an outside company to produce the pack even though we shall still have to provide them with much of the information needed to compile it
Our HIP’s will be competitively priced. The price will vary according to the size of the property and the local authority district where it is situated.We can produce a HIP within a few days (except for leasehold properties where we have to obtain information from the landlord). We can discuss with you what additional authorised documents you would like included in the pack.
We at Windeatts fear that HIPs on their own will make little difference to the speed with which the transaction proceeds once a buyer has been found. We have therefore subscribed to FASTMOVE which is a new protocol operated by a number of local solicitors and licensed conveyancers.
If you instruct us to prepare a HIP, we shall ask you a number of further questions and shall also examine the searches, title documents and enquiry forms when obtained. Where we consider documents are missing or remedial action needs to be taken we shall advise you and the opportunity can be taken to put matters right straight away without waiting for the buyer’s solicitor to raise the issue after a draft contract has been submitted. We shall also replies to a number of standard enquiries which should minimize the number of questions that are asked.
Only a solicitor prepared HIP gives you this advantage.
Where the person acting for the buyer is also a member of FASTMOVE, there is a further advantage in that members have agreed the solution of certain common problems so avoiding argument; we have even agreed the form of the contract.
We believe that the FASTMOVE protocol will make a real difference. Even if you decide to let someone else prepare your HIP, please ask them to send us a copy and consult us straight away – it could make your sale progress far more smoothly.
or visit www.fastmove.info or www.homeinformationpacks.gov.uk