First Sellers pack has gone bust
First Sellers Pack, which suffered a cash shortfall of £600,000 and has now gone into administration.
Although Hips have now gone live, Stephen Maskens, ex-chief executive of Hipstar, which lost £500,000 as a result of the delay, says that income for most Hip companies is still depressed.
Four-bedroom properties represent only around one- fifth of the total housing stock, and inspectors are therefore only able to carry out assessments on a fraction of the possible market.
You can avoid hips and that ridiculous Energy performance certificate, quite easily on all home sizes by calling your “bedrooms” rooms simple really.
Filed under: Home information packs, energy performance certificate, energy performance certificates, energy-assessors, home information pack providers, home-information -pack, sellers pack
Well its not rocket science … The amount advertising , promotions , roadshows that Hipstar did … I could easily spend £500,000.
The company we are with ( hips ) have not done one hip yet in our county (Somerset ) .. surveyors have been put on hold , they say wages are being paid , but agents are at the moment are “back dating” or “using the third bed + study” to get out of doing it for the inital 1st week or two. But what ever happens at the moment there is little or no work for the assessors who have been told up to 5 jobs a day … Its all a Farce. Agents dont want it and buyers ..who knows
The HIP, with or without an EPC, is now widely seen as an additional tax on home buying, which may also delay an already lengthy process. This was not the intention (or, in all likelihood the reality, if HIPs ever got going) but it is the perception. Perception counts for a lot, something Yvette Cooper seems not to understand. It is unlikely that she understands the business of home sales at all, judging by some of the inane pronouncements from her department. It is impossible to think of a worse planned and implemented goverment initiative. Apart from Ms. Cooper the only people in favor of HIPs are those who unwisely invested money and training effort to support them. HIPs are now so universally disliked that it is hard to see how most of the investors can recover their money. Gordon Brown needs to take a decision and kill them off once and for all. Many improvements to the home buying process are needed, but HIPs show that Yvette Cooper and her flunkies are never going to bring them about.
[...] fledgling HIPs industry has seen its first casualty as a HIPs provider has already gone into administration. No wonder the Association for Home Information Providers is doing everything possible to increase [...]