December date for Hips

Home information packs (Hips) will be a mandatory part of the process of selling a home from December 14th onwards, the government has announced.

The move is likely to delight and disappoint in equal measure. The thousands of Domestic Energy Assessors (DEAs) who have been waiting for work are now able to get on with compiling Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) as part of the packs, but others will point to the problems caused by the initial rollout of the packs.

Though the Association of Home Information Pack Providers (AHIPP) has said that such claims are baseless, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) has declared that the packs are now set to hurt first-time buyers' chances of purchasing property.

"With prospective buyers and sellers currently taking a ‘wait and see’ approach to moving, activity in the housing market is grinding to a halt," commented Rics spokesperson Jeremy Leaf.

"The housing minister needs to understand that rolling Hips out to one and two bed properties could find first-time-buyers caught between a rock and a hard place as accessibility to the market would go off the scale," Mr Leaf added.

Hips were first introduced for homes with four or more bedrooms on August 1st, following a delay of two months brought about by a legal challenge from Rics.

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