HIPs – Help Or Blow For Home Sales UK Market?

In the UK, if I want to Sell My House from now on, I need to commission, pay for & wait for a HIPs Report on my property. HIP stands for House Information Pack, and in future, any Estate Agent who advertises or attempts to sell a property without a fully finished HIP report is liable to fines up to Two Hundred Pounds per event.

Ministers insist that a HIP 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 studied some 16,000 Home sales, and point to the fact that on average, you sell your property 6 days sooner when you have a HIP.

Neverless, critics of the scheme say that it can take up to 30 days from ordering your HIP Report to actually getting it. Furthermore, it costs on average around three hundred pounds for the typical property. The combined effect of the up front £300 cost, plus the 30 day wait for the report to be finished more than outbalance the 6 days reduction in the necessary process to Sell Your House.

It’s essential to remember that the process to Sell Your House, as calculated 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 property, you have a wait of up to 30 days before an Estate Agent can even begin to put your property on the market. Then begins the long process of finding a possible Home Buyer. This can take lots of weeks, or in the current economic crisis, 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 radically extends the time taken to get a property on the market, and secondly, for families on a tight budget, there’s the problem of allocating around £300 just to get the report done.

Critics of the scheme say that it’s especially galling because it works against all the costly schemes the government have just launched in order to stop House sales UK going into an even faster downturn. Indeed, until news of this latest scheme broke, there were very strong signs that the Falls in property prices were slowing down noticeably.