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AHIPP: Hips make searches cheaper
28 August 2008 11:30
The Association of Home Information Pack (Hip) Providers (AHIPP) has refuted claims that these packs should be slimmed down and no longer include local searches.
Earlier this week, the National Association of Estate Agents blamed Hips for exacerbating the housing market slowdown and demanded that they be reviewed.
It was especially critical of their inclusion of local searches, stating that homes are often on sale for so long at present that these searches are out of date by the time they are sold.
Yet the AHIPP has contested these suggestions, arguing that Hips have cut the price of a local authority search by £30 on average and of personal searches by half, while the data these searches contain does not change over a 12-month period in 98 per cent of cases.
Director general Mike Ockenden therefore asserted that it is not necessary for purchase conveyancers to re-order searches, but that even if it was, the cost of doing so would be outweighed by the savings that Hips had brought the homebuyer in the first place.
He lamented what he described as an effort to play on current market conditions in order to sabotage an important reform, insisting that the search information contained in Hips makes buyers better informed, reducing the chances of transactions falling through.
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