Sep
3
The Sunday Times published a damning article about HIPs yesterday in which it described home information packs as mostly being a nuisance for sellers and of little interest to buyers.
This is demonstrated by the experience of one house seller whose house was inspected by an energy efficiency inspector recently. The inspector measured the size of each room (later to be repeated by the estate agent – where is the efficiency in that) and will probably provide a low energy efficiency rating for his house, which is not surprising as it was built in the 1880′s.
Any buyer will accept that a house of this age will not, and cannot, meet latest enegy specifications, so they will ignore the report and still buy the house anyway.
Of greater concern to estate agents, apparently, is the fact that speculative house sellers, who put their house on the market to test the water, are being deterred by the costs of the home information packs.
This is reducing the volume of homes going onto the market and could actually force house prices up.
