HIPs day arrives - at last
Author: Gary Horsley · Posted: August 01, 2007
Finally, on August 1st, the legislation on Home Information Packs came into effect. It starts as a reduced version - only for homes with four or more bedrooms, with an anticipated gradual extension through the rest of the year. But the strong message from the Government is that, come January 1st 2008, it will be HIPs all round.
For some time now we have been promising that, despite the delays and redirections, we would be ready with Ownerpack come the day that HIPs legislation finally arrived. And ready we were, with a number of trials safely under our belt and a number of estate agents in our region waiting to offer Ownerpack to appropriate clients.
We were not anticipating that the public would flock to estate agents on August 1st and demand a HIP for their many four bedroom homes. It may be some time before there is even the slightest hint of a trickle of demand, let alone a deluge, but there is no doubt that HIPs are finally with us. Assuming no great surprise in the coming weeks, extension to three-bedrooms and so on is likely to be a feature of the rest of the year.
It has been a longer journey to this point that many of us anticipated but, if anything, our cooperation with colleagues in the local property market has been grown stronger as we have adapted together to the various changes of direction. In that respect, we have achieved one of our main aims - ensuring that the local public has a ready answer to the legislation from the people that have served the property market in this area for many years. We now have to achieve our aim of providing good quality, inexpensive, HIPs to home owners: we remain confident that this will not be a problem.