HIP First Day Marketing
From 1st June 2008 the Home Information Pack must be complete before a property can be marketed by an estate agent. At the moment, the HIP only has to be ordered for the property to be marketed. With some HIP providers seeing a delay of up to three weeks for the Home Information Packs to be completed, this could result in significant delay for sellers. One of the main reasons for delay is that local authorities and indeed the search companies are not providing search results quickly enough.
We believe that the problems with local authority searches will be largely overcome by June and buyers will benefit tremendously from a complete Home Information Pack when making a decision to put in an offer on a property or not.
However, not everybody agrees with us and Nick Salmon from SPLINTA (Sellers’ Pack Law Is Not The Answer) has started a petition to scrap the introduction of the first-day-marketing rules:
“Despite massive opposition the Home Information Pack has been introduced for all residential properties. Currently the marketing of a property can begin as soon as the HIP is ordered but the Government intends to end this concession on 31st May 2008 and will require that the pack is physically complete before marketing commences. This will cause delays for sellers wanting to begin marketing quickly and is an infringement of the personal liberty to sell a property at will. There is no sustainable argument in favour of ending First Day Marketing and we call on the Government to allow its continuance indefinitely.”