If Home Information Packs (HIPs) had not been scrapped we would not be in the confusing position we are now with the introduction of the new Material Information Guidance (MIG). The HIP, over the last decade or so, would have evolved into a pack that could easily have contained all of the new required Material Information (MI). Are we now being offered another bite of the cherry, and should we all be grasping this bull by the horns?
If I remember rightly, the basic HIP contained; Office Copies and a File Plan, a pretty useless Property Information Questionnaire and a Local and a Water and Drainage Search. Admittedly nothing of much use to a potential buyer or even a buyer’s conveyancer. However, some HIP providing companies (including mine) were, by working closely with the seller’s conveyancer, adding additional documents whilst the property was still being marketed. For example, copies of documents containing, Restrictions, Easements, Rights, and Covenants.
In addition we were adding Guarantees, Planning Permissions, and Building Regulation Approvals. In fact anything and everything that would help the transaction proceed quickly and easily. Most of our HIPs, as a result, became as exchange ready as was possible. It therefore would not have been beyond the wit of man (or woman) to have easily and quickly added the other information now required by the MIG.
Due to a healthy amount of competition between HIP suppliers and others, the price of a HIP was not at an amount high enough to have deterred most property sellers from marketing their property. And, there was a very good deferred cost offering available that was being used by many (wouldn’t that be helpful now?). HIP production was also very rapid, so there was hardly any delay from taking a property on, to being able to market it. Although HIP production was fast back then, given the massive advancement of technology over the years, they would be being produced almost instantaneously now.
I distinctly remember a meeting of the Association of HIP providers and Grant Shapps, where the former made it clear that its members would do all in their power to refine the poor product that The Housing Act 2004 stipulated was required. Shapps was having none if it however, HIPs were going whether we liked it or not. He is now in charge of the defence of our country and in these troubled times, I sincerely hope he does a better job.
We now have a situation where MI is required, but is not yet being supplied by many agents, probably because, although there are penalties, Trading Standards is not yet willing, or able, or both to implement/enforce them. HIPs however were brought in by statute and it would have been a serious offence for a property to have been marketed without one. There was virtually 100% HIP compliance.
Compliance with the MIG will eventually happen, because those requirements are not going to go away, but it will take time and will for some, be painful. All this confusion and uncertainty now would have been unnecessary, if only those in power had had the gumption to suspend HIPs for a while and work out (with the help of those involved) what additional information and documentation was required in order to make them beneficial for all parties.
HIPs won’t return, but we don’t want to make the same mistakes again and be in this muddled situation in another decade’s time. Whatever MI evolves into, it must benefit all parties, seller, buyer, agent, conveyancer and surveyor. In my opinion, the only way that will happen is if all of those parties work together over the coming weeks and months.
Rob Hailstone is founder of the Bold Group, a network of conveyancers
