HIPs tell buyers how much YOU paid for your property

chriserenity

Hi all,

The Land Registry documents in HIPs for second hand homes clearly state how much the seller paid for the property when they bought it. Depending on how long ago this was do you think the buyer could make use of this information when negotiating/putting in an offer?

While these documents were available before I gather not many buyers actually got to see them as the solicitor ordered the docs and dealt with it all.

Cheers.

ducey

The price of a house is available online anyway - http://www.houseprices.co.uk and various other sites too. Just a case of looking and you can find out how much it was bought for. So having this info available in the HIP, rather than viewing it online doesn't make much difference I think.

chriserenity

I had a look at the website you posted and I could find prices of other surrounding properties which is a useful guide but the figures seemed to vary wildly even on the same street. In the HIP you get the ACTUAL price paid for that particular property and the date it was paid.

Perhaps the info might be useful for non-internet using buyers? Or is there already an offline alternative source of information about house prices. Beside estate agents I mean

scope

It will make a difference though, as most people dont know you can get the house prices online, now it is handed to them.

And yes, to a certain degree this will be used when negotiating the price.

scope

chriserenity wrote: »

I had a look at the website you posted and I could find prices of other surrounding properties which is a useful guide but the figures seemed to vary wildly even on the same street. In the HIP you get the ACTUAL price paid for that particular property and the date it was paid.

The website will show all house prices since 2000.. If the house in questions isnt there it just means it has not been sold since 2000.

chriserenity

scope wrote: »

It will make a difference though, as most people dont know you can get the house prices online, now it is handed to them.

And yes, to a certain degree this will be used when negotiating the price.

Well, I'm hearing alot of buyers aren't getting to see the HIP as its being handed straight to the buyer's solicitors. Perhaps then its the solicitors job to inform the buyer of the previous price information contained in the Land Registry documents.

What do the board's resident solicitors think about doing this?

bryanb

If you are a potential buyer why would you not ask to see the HIP. They are prepared to help sell the property!!

chriserenity

bryanb wrote: »

If you are a potential buyer why would you not ask to see the HIP. They are prepared to help sell the property!!

Well, yes there is lots of info in the HIP about the property but the problem is that alot of it is next to meaningless to a buyer. Not because its not relevant but because its not in an easy to understand format and so needs a trained solicitor to interpret it. HIP providers can't really control how the information is presented e.g. the info comes back from HMLR and we have to include it as is (its the rules).

Heres an excerpt from a HMLR document as an example:

"The transferee shall not part with possession of the whole or any part of the property together with any works thereon (if any) without incorporating into the transfer covenants and conditions identical in all respects to those referred to herein save that the transferee or its successors in title may transfer any part of the property on which one or more completed residential units have been constructed free of this requirement".

*blink blink* see?

I now think of HIPs as being solicitors information packs with the Energy Performance Certificate and Home Use/Contents forms being the only 'buyer friendly' documents.

Thats why I'm questioning whether solicitors have a duty to pick out the buyer relevant information and disseminate it to their client to better inform them about the property. Information like how much the vendor paid for the property x number of years ago so it can be compared to the asking price for example.

Richard_Webster

Buyers aren't looking at HIPs according to all the estate agents I've talked to in my area - is it the same in Bawtry, Chrisereienty?

Very savvy buyers have been downloading the Land Registry entries for the place they are buying - which cost £3 each - and recent transactions will show there.

Occasionally this can be misleading, e.g. Mr A & Miss B buy house for £150K with £120K mortgage and then split up not long afterwards and the house value hasn't changed. A buys B out for half the difference between the mortgage and the purchase price, i.e. £15K and that figure appears at the Registry as the price A bought it for!

Solicitors will generally send copies of the registry entries to their clients with a pre-contract report so the information will come out then, but it doesn't seem to make much difference these days.

Years ago when I first learnt conveyancing in the early 1970s the price paid was shown on the Land Registry entries and as the Registry wasn't public then only the seller's solicitors could get office copies. What we used to do was carefully cut out the little bit of the entries that showed the price and supply the mutilated version with the draft contract to the buyer's solicitors. Once contracts were exchanged the buyer's solcitors would get the "price-cutting" and authority to inspect the register that enabled them to do a search to check all was OK with title! We thought this was important because between 1970 and 1971 prices more than doubled in London over less than a year. A typical Metroland semi worth £6,000 was worth may be £14,000 a year later!

david29dpo

Some Title registers do not show the price paid and it not the solicitors job to pass judgement on the price paid. The agent must show or give a copy of the HIP to any interested buyer by law, with a few exceptions.

boinging_2

scope wrote: »

It will make a difference though, as most people dont know you can get the house prices online, now it is handed to them.

And yes, to a certain degree this will be used when negotiating the price.

Surely this is no bad thing? Though ultimately what some one paid for a property would have no bearing on what I'd offer on it.

It's all about the hear and now...