Q: Will buyers Solicitors / conveyancers accept the contents of a hip, or will have their own due diligence to obtain documents?
I talking about less than 3 months old.
I documents would be interested to know your thoughts. If the docs useful, perhaps, in most cases, Home Information Packs may work after all?
What are we going to get in practice?
Leave aside leasehold flats where there will be a whole load of stuff to do with the management etc of the block.
In a freehold HIP we will get an EPC, which will simply be another document to go through our file. We won't do anything with it apart from sending a copy to our buyer client to make sure they have seen it. It isn't a legal document so we won't comment on it. Hopefully people will realise that older houses won't be as energy efficient as newer ones.
We will get official copies of the Land Registry entries and plan which would come with the draft contract anyway. No problem there.
We will get a drainage search (which in a lot of cases isn't really vital but the water companies persuaded the governement it is). If this is more than 3 months old I would use my common sense. How likely is it that the water company will disconnect a property from the public foul sewerage system?
We will get a local search. If this is more than 3 months old it will need either doing again or validating with local search validation insurance – ￡30 or so depending on the value of the property. If it comes from the Local Authority itself then it will be acceptable to any conveyancer. However, many conveyancers now do their searches through private search agencies such STL, Onesearch, Richards Gray, etc. These are generally cheaper and often quicker than those "officially" through the local authority. Some solicitors and some lenders will not accept these. It could then mean that a buyer's solicitor will insist on repeating the search to get one from the local authority. It will be a judgement call for those providing HIPs whether they do the search agency search (to standardise cost and keep it down) or the local authority one (usually more expensive) to guarantee acceptability.
The problems will be more about the detail. The Land Registry official copies often don't mean a lot without a copy of another document, typically a transfer deed between a builder and the firts buyer of a new house, which would contain rights for service connections and various covenants etc about not building, not having caravans on the drive, etc, etc. So we will have to ask for this, but we often do now anyway, as solrs forget to send them.
A non legally qualified HIP provider could easily provide naff documentation, e.g on a sale of a 1930s semi owned for many years by someone who has just died, they do Land Registry check to see the title for 23 Acacia Gardens and find title YZ123456 for "Land at 23 Acacia Gardens" so they get the official copies and put that in the HIP. What has actually happened is that the deceased bought the house in 1951 long before the title had to be registered, so the title to the house itself and a stretch of garden is not registered, but she bought some land off a neighbour in 1990, when that land did have to be registered. All the HIP provider has produced is the title to the piece of extra land – with nothing about the house itself! We get that kind of nonsense with contract packages from factory conveyancers now, but in the future that could get worse. Of course, it will only happen in a few cases where there is some kind of complication.
As a conveyancing solicitor I believe the information given in the post to be useful but I accept no liability except to fee-paying clients.