In the UK, if I want to Sell My House from now on, I must order, 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 endeavours to sell a property without a completely completed HIP report is liable to fines up to Two Hundred Pounds per incident.

The government insist that a House Information Pack actually quickens the process you go through to Sell Your House. They say this is because all the questions which Home Buyers had to search to answer in the past, will now be answered “up front” in the HIP. The government claims to have surveyed some 16,000 Home sales, and point to the fact that on average, you sell your property six days quicker when you have a HIP.

Nonetheless, critics of the plan say that it can take up to 30 days from commissioning your HIP Report to actually getting it. Furthermore, it costs on average about £300 for the standard property. The combined effect of the up front £300 cost, plus the 30 day wait for the report to be completed more than outweigh the six days reduction in the actual process to Sell Your House.

It’s essential to remember that the process to Sell Your House, as measured by the government, doesn’t begin 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 many weeks, or in the current economic chaos, even months or years.

Therefore, when you take the entire process into account, it looks like all the government have accomplished is to place a substantial obstacle in your way if you want to Sell Your House. The obstacle harms the market in two ways. Firstly it radically lengthens the time taken to get a property on the market, and secondly, for families on a tight budget, there’s the dilemma of allocating around £300 just to get the report completed.

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

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