HELP! Any Property Professionals with forms LLC1 and CON29?

Doozergirl

I'm putting together my own HIP and I can't get hold of these forms.

Is anyone able to provide me with a copy or know where I can get hold of an electronic copy?

I'm being interviewed by BBC Hereford and Worcester on Monday morning and I'm only halfway through the blinking thing!

dolce_vita

Try this mob dooz - they supply all sorts of legal forms

http://www.oyezformslink.co.uk/f_chapters/5.htm

Doozergirl

Cheers dolce vita. They do have those forms. Cost about £7. The LLC1 has to be posted, which is a pain considering you can get a pdf of the other.

I just called my local council again to check exactly which one I needed and the man has offered to go and get the forms from his legal department. I'm going to the town hall on Monday morning and he will go through the forms with me and submit them for me £7 saved and £30 saved from using a search company!

Not easy at all to do this but at least other people in my borough will find it easier to create a DIY HIP in future!

Next stop, the Drainage searches. Aaarggh!

dolce_vita

Good luck with all that and let us know the house sale goes.

david29dpo

Call me and i will give you them for free.xx

m178591

There is some con29 stuff here:
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandards/schemalibrary_schema.asp?schemaid=205

I used to work in the search industry. Can't really help you much as I worked on the IT side. What I can tell you is that the LLC1 is an official local authority document. What you will pay £7 for is exactly the same document as you would get if you used a private search company. From memory, the amount you are charged is laid down in law so it should be the same at all local authorities in England and Wales. The con29 is the standard local search document I think. In principle all you need to do is inspect the relevent records which are all public records and fill in the blanks. In practice it is in fact not much more complicated than this. Once upon a time your solicitor would ask the local authority to do this and they would charge a fee which varied between authorities. If the solicitor needed the search urgently they could go down the the council office and do it themselves. Now it is common to use a private comapny to collate this data and provide the con29 report. HOWEVER, the sting in the tail is that ultimatly most of these documents are done because they are requested by the mortgage lender. You could spend the time doing them yourself but the mortgage lender would only accept the ones done by the solicitor or by the local authority. One of the big things for us as a private search company was convincing solicitors that the lenders would accept our searches. Because of this, it was, for most people, pointless doing your own searches even though you could save money because your lender would not accept your search in case you did not report any problems you should have reported.
With the new HIP the responsibility is with the seller to provide the searches not the buyer. This seems to be another major shortfall of the sellers pack. You are required to provide certain bits of info in the HIP. In the past you as a buyer were responsible for providing these reports to your lender (which your solicitor did). If you didn't they wouldn't lend you the money until you did so you had to use someone who provided the searches the lender found acceptable to get your money released. Now, you can prepare the documents yourself. There is no obligation on the seller to provide them from a search company which the eventual buyers lender will accept. Different lenders accept searches from different providers. You won't know which lender your buyer is using until you have a buyer. You won't have a buyer until you have your house on the market which you can't do until you have prepared the searches. The only way you can be 100% sure the lender will accept the search is to use the formal local authority report which is usually even more expensive than the private search companies report. This means that there is a good chance that even though you have prepared the searches the buyer will still have to commision their own searches to satisfy their lender. I have seen reports of this in the press which means that now, in some cases, the new system will result in two sets of reports having to be prepared rather than one.

dolce_vita

m178591 wrote: »

There is some con29 stuff here:
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandards/schemalibrary_schema.asp?schemaid=205

I used to work in the search industry. Can't really help you much as I worked on the IT side. What I can tell you is that the LLC1 is an official local authority document. What you will pay £7 for is exactly the same document as you would get if you used a private search company. From memory, the amount you are charged is laid down in law so it should be the same at all local authorities in England and Wales. The con29 is the standard local search document I think. In principle all you need to do is inspect the relevent records which are all public records and fill in the blanks. In practice it is in fact not much more complicated than this. Once upon a time your solicitor would ask the local authority to do this and they would charge a fee which varied between authorities. If the solicitor needed the search urgently they could go down the the council office and do it themselves. Now it is common to use a private comapny to collate this data and provide the con29 report. HOWEVER, the sting in the tail is that ultimatly most of these documents are done because they are requested by the mortgage lender. You could spend the time doing them yourself but the mortgage lender would only accept the ones done by the solicitor or by the local authority. One of the big things for us as a private search company was convincing solicitors that the lenders would accept our searches. Because of this, it was, for most people, pointless doing your own searches even though you could save money because your lender would not accept your search in case you did not report any problems you should have reported.
With the new HIP the responsibility is with the seller to provide the searches not the buyer. This seems to be another major shortfall of the sellers pack. You are required to provide certain bits of info in the HIP. In the past you as a buyer were responsible for providing these reports to your lender (which your solicitor did). If you didn't they wouldn't lend you the money until you did so you had to use someone who provided the searches the lender found acceptable to get your money released. Now, you can prepare the documents yourself. There is no obligation on the seller to provide them from a search company which the eventual buyers lender will accept. Different lenders accept searches from different providers. You won't know which lender your buyer is using until you have a buyer. You won't have a buyer until you have your house on the market which you can't do until you have prepared the searches. The only way you can be 100% sure the lender will accept the search is to use the formal local authority report which is usually even more expensive than the private search companies report. This means that there is a good chance that even though you have prepared the searches the buyer will still have to commision their own searches to satisfy their lender. I have seen reports of this in the press which means that now, in some cases, the new system will result in two sets of reports having to be prepared rather than one.

I appreciate your expertise in this field but did you have to write all this just to say that buyer's solicitors may not accept private searches being included in HIPs?

david29dpo

The con-29 is not used anymore and with not be accepted, so as the con29dw. The llc1 has not changed. I have recently started a Hip company and will only be using official searches, and recommend people who wish to do there own do the same.

Doozergirl

If you were to carry out your own search, ie. search the records and fill in the information yourself, does this mean that the local authority don't charge you for that information? (£95 for my local authority). I was going to pay for the official searches.

I believe the new form is the CON29(R)? Which Oyez don't appear to stock. This is what the nice man at the LA is going to find for me.

David, the envelope with the cheque for my CON29DW from Severn Trent is next to me. Do I need to make it clear that it is for use in a HIP?

Doozergirl

This is turning out to be such an experience! It would probably be fair to say that no-one I have spoken to has any idea how I can go about putting together my own pack. The Home Information Pack website contains skeleton information and the rest has been a case of calling all sorts of people and googling hard.

My EA was asking me for a letter or some sort of sign off from my solicitor acknowledging that my HIP had been ordered or even approving my HIP. The people at the government department have told me that is poppycock - I am my own HIP provider and I don't need anyone to give it the okay. The EA needs the graph from the EPC, and that's basically it, to start marketing.

People here have told me to hold off on the searches until I get a buyer - my solicitor says just do them now as they were suggesting that my HIP was not 'ordered' unless I had ordered the searches as well. I didn't check this with the government people though as I get the distinct impression that EAs and Sols are just happier with it all being in place, regardless of whether it is of any use. The searches are potentially a total waste of money as they are only really valid on the day they are carried out, therefore a buyer may want a new search at any point. I should just pay the money and be satisfied that I have a complete Home Information Pack. Which I'm obviously not!

I thought I would not entirely be throwing my money away if I commissioned the official searches for my buyer when they actually needed them.

I'm wondering now, (if you are not charged for carrying out your own personal search), whether it would be more sensible for me to put in a 'token' personal search using my searches from when I bought the property to help me OR indeed, do I just locate and stick in copies of my original searches?! and then offer a fresh official search when it is more useful to a buyer?

Debt_Free_Chick

Doozergirl wrote: »

I'm wondering now, (if you are not charged for carrying out your own personal search), whether it would be more sensible for me to put in a 'token' personal search ...

That gave a thought on HIPs in general. Wouldn't a better solution to the whole HIP issue have been simply to have "gift vouchers" to give to your buyers? one for the survey, one for the search, one for the ....

:rotfl: