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 home. HIP stands for House Information Pack, and in future, any Estate Agent who advertises or attempts to sell a home without a fully completed HIP report is liable to fines up to Two Hundred Pounds per event.
Ministers insist that a House Information Pack actually accelerates the process you go through to Sell Your House. They say this is because all the questions which Home Buyers had to search to answer in the past, will now be answered “up front” in the HIP. The government claims to have surveyed some 16,000 Home sales, and point to the fact that on average, you sell your house six days earlier when you have a HIP.
Neverless, critics of the plan say that it can take up to 30 days from ordering your HIP Report to actually having it. In addition, it costs on average approximately three hundred pounds for the typical home. The combined effect of the up front £300 cost, plus the 30 day wait for the report to be completed more than outweigh the six days reduction in the actual process to Sell Your House.
It’s vital to remember that the process to Sell Your House, as measured by the government, doesn’t start until a possible 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 home, you have a wait of up to 30 days before an Estate Agent can even begin to put your home on the market. Then begins the long process of finding a possible Home Buyer. This can take lots of weeks, or in the present credit crunch, even months or years.
Therefore, when you take the whole process into account, it looks like all the government have accomplished is to place a substantial obstacle in your way if you want to Sell Your House. The obstacle harms the market in two ways. Firstly it radically slows down the time taken to get a home on the market, and secondly, for families on a small budget, there’s the problem of allocating around £300 just to get the report done.
Critics of the plan say that it’s especially annoying because it works against all the costly plans the government have just introduced in order to stop House sales UK going into an even faster downturn. Indeed, until news of this most recent plan broke, there were very strong signs that the Falls in home values were slowing down markedly.