Going to stick our house on the market, does it matter who we get the HIP with? Cheapest online is £150, the various estate agents recommend providers between £250 and £300. Does it make any difference?!

Seeing as I think they’re an uneccessary waste of money – I’d go cheapest.

Shouldn’t – its all simple reports and checks.

Might make a difference. A good energy assessor might be able to get you a better rating for your house as they may be more willing to investigate your services/fabric elements. Say you had a new boiler, an energy assessor could look up the exact efficiency online for the boiler. Alternatively, they could just use the default value for the type of boiler which would give a significantly worse rating.

If it was me though, I’d go cheap!

HIPs, are they all the same?

Yes, a complete waste of money!

Sort of off topic here, but here goes….in the pre HIP world when you bought a house you paid your solicitor a mint to take their merry old time collating all of the searches on your new home to be. Inevitably they dragged their feet as did the local authority, land registry and so forth because most of the information was not digital.

Then if the sale fall through, you’ve still paid for all that time and effort.

Fast forward to the HIP world and now all of that paper data has been digitised and the seller compiles that data once and it takes no time at all. This allows the sale to go through quicker (but alas this depends on the solicitors) and if the sale falls through the buyer at least hasn’t wasted money on doing the searches…..nor will any subsequent buyer.

The fact is, you were paying whatever the HIP costs beforehand anyway and probably a fair bit more in solicitors fees besides. Shifting the responsibility for providing the searches to the seller makes absolute sense to me.

Doesnt it just mean the solicitors will increase their fee to maintain the same cost overall?

Coffeeking, basically, yes!

We went with HIPS4U. They were recommended on the moneyfacts website. Very impressed with cost and speed. Good luck selling by the way!

Thanks, we will need all the luck we can get 🙂

Beginning of the month the HIPs changed, you now need stage 1 of the HIP (basic searches etc) before the estate agents are allowed to market the property. So the water board etc who do all the searches are snowed under and if your wondering why there has been so few new houses coming onto the market in the last two weeks, its cos they are held up waiting for the HIPs! Before it just had to be paid for.

Many think the energy rating thing a waste of time in that they wouldn’t buy or not buy based on what it says – old houses generally have more character but are less efficient, new ones generally have less character but are more efficient…. Well, that’s why I left the aging sash windows in my old Victorian house anyway!