home inspector.co.uk newspages..

Urgent Calls for Three-bed homes to join HIPs scheme

Three-bedroom homes will have to be marketed with a Home Information Pack within a matter of weeks, say industry leaders.

Chief Executive of property-careers.com, Stephen Callaghan together with HIP providers has been lobbying hard in recent weeks to persuade the Government to extend the scheme to the whole of the housing market.

HIPs were introduced just over two weeks ago and at present only homeowners selling properties with four bedrooms or more have to pay for a HIP.

The Government has so far refused to say when it will roll out the scheme to smaller properties but industry leaders now say they are confident it will be a matter of weeks before three-bedroom properties are included.

Stephen Callaghan said: "We have spoken to the Government on several occasions over the past month asking them to push forward with requiring all homes to be marketed with a HIP. Now is an excellent time to do it. I believe the Government and the whole industry share a common intent to roll out HIPs to the whole market as soon as possible."

The CLG states there are now 3,100 fully accredited and trained energy assessors, which should be sufficient to service the demand from now until the New Year, the traditional time when the market picks-up momentum.

"The first two weeks of operating our EPC business exchange, the-energy-portal have gone very smoothly with a fair amount of instructions being placed to consultants. However, we all know that because of the 4 plus bedroom limitations, the volume of EPCs represents only 17% of the full market. This is disappointing to the many hundreds of DEAs and Home Inspectors on our panel all of whom are eager for introduced work.

There are no official figures for how many properties have three bedrooms or fewer, but they are understood to make up about half of the 1.9 million homes sold every year.

A spokesman for Communities and Local Government said: "We will roll out to other sized properties when there are sufficient energy inspectors in place nationally and regionally to meet market demand, taking into account the operation of the scheme.

"We will roll-out as quickly as possible and want to ensure a smooth transition in the housing market."

August 2007