H.I.P… R.I.P.

HIPs (Home Information Packs) have now been with us a while and there is still speculation as to whether they will continue in their current form, a revised form or even at all. Whilst they have some support, admittedly mainly from those organisations who actually make a living from providing them, it has to be said that HIPS remain universally disliked by vendors, buyers, agents, solicitors and virtually everyone else involved in the property industry. And it is this lack of support which will ultimately lead to their demise.

So why is it that everyone seems to have it in for HIPs? After all, weren’t they supposed to speed up the property buying process, give buyers confidence and stop all of those painful and expensive fall-throughs that we all hear about?

The simple truth is that whilst this may have been the ambition, the implementation of HIPs hasn’t made any real difference to the man and woman on the high street. In fact it seems to have generated more work and expense for vendors, done little to remove the workload for solicitors on either side of the purchase and have introduced delay and confusion for agents putting properties on the market. 

Proponents often quote the fact that transaction times have come down from an average of 80-days to around 60 with HIPs but even that figure is in doubt as the use of electronic data transmission by the Land Registry (which used to be responsible for a lot of delays in the past) could well be responsible for that gain.

Anecdotal evidence from solicitors suggests that HIPs prepared by ‘specialist’ HIP providers may be a 2nd class product. This is often down to the fact that the pack provider simply uses a box-ticking approach, simply compiling the HIP instead of actually reviewing and highlighting any issues raised by the searches results and other documentation involved. 

More than one sale has fallen-through as a result of basic and fundamental problems with property title, planning permissions and a myriad of other problems which the HIP contained but which the pack provider failed to inform the vendor of.  This is the one thing that HIPs were supposed to prevent.

Another major promise of HIPS was that the conveyancing process would be made cheaper for buyers, as vendors would pay for HIP production. In practice these savings have never materialised. Instead buyers’ solicitors often perform the very same searches and information requests simply duplicating the work of the vendors’ solicitors.

In the cold light of day, anyone looking to spend hundreds of thousands, even millions, of pounds on a property will always want to carry out their own due diligence on the purchase instead of relying on documents prepared by the vendor. Not only is this a basic and simple human response to a complex and expensive transaction but one that makes a lot of sense and one that has served the property industry pretty well for generations.

And at the end of the day, it will be this simple fact that will spell the death-knell for HIPs regardless of whatever the Government tries to do to make them more attractive