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Happy Birthday HIPs
The controversial Home Information Pack (HIP) is celebrating its first birthday this week.
Since the scheme hit the market on 1 August 2007, it has received a less than enthusiastic welcome from property professionals and buyers and sellers.
One year on, whether HIPs have delivered on what they were meant to achieve, which was improving the marketplace by helping to stop property transactions falling through, along with supporting the mortgage market by helping them to keep abreast of individual property transactions, remains to be seen.
Peter Bolton King, chief executive of the National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA), said: “Since the conception the packs have been surrounded by a catalogue of disasters and so far rather than helping to improve the home buying and selling process they have served as a hindrance and nothing more than a purposeless piece of red tape.
"The launch of HIPs onto the marketplace was far from smooth with delays and u-turns, together with a fundamental error on timing.
“Indeed the debate still rages whether the timing of the launch has had a crippling effect on what is an already a rocky time for the property industry. Indeed, there is still no clarity on the long-term plans for the abolition of "first day marketing" scheduled initially for December 1 last year.
“However, despite the gloomy outlook for the packs in 2007 it seems that 2008/9 might bring a change for the better. We welcome Caroline Flint’s decision to work with property professionals such as the NAEA to take another look at the content of HIPs.
“We have always maintained that in their present state, they are of little use to either seller or buyer and therefore we embrace the opportunity to come up with a package that includes real benefits to the customer and will actually assist the buying and selling process - after all, that was the original intention of this legislation,” Mr Bolton King went on to say.
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