Few Tears Shed Over End of Hips ; Property Expert Nigel Lewis, From Findaproperty.Com, Looks at the Move to Scrap Home Information Packs.

Summary

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Is it good news that Home Information Packs (HIPs) are being scrapped? The answer is a resounding "yes". But why do we loathe them so? When HIPs were announced in the 1997 Labour manifesto, the aim was to clean up the buying process in England and Wales by both weeding out the evils of gazumping and gazundering and also preventing the 200,000 or more property sales that were falling through each year because of problems with surveys, local searches and title deeds after an offer had been made. A good idea, surely? But almost every solution offered up faced opposition from agents, surveyors, house-builders and home-owners and it took ten years for the HIP to become a compulsory part of the buying process, in August 2007.

At first covering just four-bedroom properties and later extended to three-bedroom homes, they finally became universal in April last year.

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Extract

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Few Tears Shed Over End of Hips ; Property Expert Nigel Lewis, From Findaproperty.Com, Looks at the Move to Scrap Home Information Packs.

But many experts said the HIP was too watered down and they were right. Much of its power...

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