Today HIP's were delayed. Again. Everyone in the industry has said they made no sense. I am in the industry, and have read numerous articles about the packs. None of them made me think that the packs would serve any useful purpose.
This is another case where the idea is appealing, but the implementation is catastrophic. The idea seems to be that the information that the solicitor puts together in preparation for the sale can be produced before the sale.
The problem is that this information has a very short validity period. Things change, and generally lenders want information that is not more than a couple of months out of date. Given that many properties remain on the market for a year or so, the preparation of a HIP prior to the property being marketed is a disaster.
A much better solution would be to put the information about each property online, so that the conveyancer can access this information directly online, rather than via an exchange of paper. But this would require the government to actually deliver some working IT systems, something it knows in its heart that it cannot do.
There is a lot of discussion about what impact this will have on house prices. I suspect that the answer is "not much".
FT Article
This is another case where the idea is appealing, but the implementation is catastrophic. The idea seems to be that the information that the solicitor puts together in preparation for the sale can be produced before the sale.
The problem is that this information has a very short validity period. Things change, and generally lenders want information that is not more than a couple of months out of date. Given that many properties remain on the market for a year or so, the preparation of a HIP prior to the property being marketed is a disaster.
A much better solution would be to put the information about each property online, so that the conveyancer can access this information directly online, rather than via an exchange of paper. But this would require the government to actually deliver some working IT systems, something it knows in its heart that it cannot do.
There is a lot of discussion about what impact this will have on house prices. I suspect that the answer is "not much".
FT Article
Update 18th Dec 2007. HIPs are now activated. The market is in free fall, but this surely has more to do with the credit crunch than HIPs. However it is certainly the case that hardly anybody has benefited from these stupid packs, and I confidently predict that the delay between the offer and completion will grow, rather than contract, now that HIPs are finally implemented.
