Trading Standard Officers are on the offensive and are ready to scoop down and impose fixed fines on estate agents for failure to comply with the Home Information Pack Regulations that have now been on force for over two years.
Officers have already uncovered non-compliance following visits to around forty estate firms of estate agents in the Birmingham area. Fixed penalty fines were imposed and non-compliance was found to be running at around 10%.
A fine of up to £200 can be imposed for failing to comply with the Regulations each time a breach is uncovered. Technically therefore the agent can be fined £200 for each day the agent is found to be in breach.
The officers have taken HIPs away for compliance checks that are to be carried out in conjunction with the Property Code Compliance Board – the ‘HIP’ Regulators.
Further unannounced visits of this type are planned and will be taking place around the Country over the next couple of months.
Non-compliance exists in every industry and given that ‘policing’ up until now had been reactive as opposed to proactive, the level of default is not as high as one might expect, particularly given the repetition of unhelpful calls from the Conservatives to ‘scrap’ HIPs.
This news comes at a time when Connells, a national chain of estate agents, has announced that following a survey of a large number of transactions (over 30,000) they are now able to provide irrefutable evidence that the HIP has helped to reduce the time it takes to progress a conveyancing transaction from acceptance of offer to exchange of contract by at least 7 days. This represents a significant improvement in the system and must even for the most doubting of estate agent demonstrate the importance of compliance and of making sure the HIP is kept and improved should, as is likely, there is a change of Government.
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