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Are you missing your Property Information Questionnaire (PIQ)?

So are agents going to welcome the Property Information Questionnaire(PIQ) with open arms? You bet they won't, 95% of them have never heard of it, but word is now out courtesy of a reply to a Parliamentary Question that agents can look forward to being fined if the PIQ is missing or incomplete!

In a written answer to this Parliamentary question

what penalties may be imposed upon a householder not completing, in whole or in part, information on a Property Information Questionnaire on a home information pack and then marketing a property.

Iain Wright said

The Home Information Pack Regulations provide that the person responsible for marketing the property must ensure that a valid pack is provided to potential buyers. This would include ensuring a completed PIQ has been included in the HIP. In the vast majority of cases the responsible person will be the seller's estate agent.

The local weights and measures authority has the power to issue a penalty charge notice of 200 pounds on the responsible person for a breach of the HIP duties.

How kind! So thats another potential fine to be avoided by agents, who at this time, have no idea this is on the agenda and going to arrive as their responsibility very very soon! We shall be briefing the agents we work with and keeping them informed as the countdown to PIQ day starts. This additional paperwork will be the final nail in the coffin to disorganised and incompetent pack providers who have managed to wing it so far without investing in the right people and technology to make the process repeatible and to an appropriate high standard.

Does anyone actually remember the Home Condition Report?

Sound familiar anyone? Well apparently CLG run a Stakeholder Panel on Home Buying and Selling and they are going to issue some proposals in the Autumn about a condition report within the HIP. Apologies if I sound a touch cynical but being over 8 grand down for a HI qualification that has no value means that I find any CLG chatter about HCRs of absolutely no value or interest. Far more likely that RICS will open the door to allow HIs a route to a real career. I might not agree with everything RICS says or does, as it also the case with the NAEA, but they are at least consistent in their view and don't give out mixed or incoherent messages which is what we have had all too often from the politicians and CLG.

Scrapping HIPs?

And finally, with plenty of chatter about whether the Tories will scrap HIPs assuming they win the next election, which of course they will, Grant Shapps (Con) fired in the old chestnut:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government if she will use her powers under section 162 of the Housing Act 2004 to suspend the requirement to product a home information pack to market a property.

and do stop panicking at the back there, as Iain Wright Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Hartlepool, Labour said:

We have no plans to suspend Home Information Packs.

So Iain Wright keeps us in check once again.

One other industry 'gentleman' from Hartlepool has been rabble-rousing again this week, trying to drag my name through the mud. He'll keep trying, sadly its all he has got left to do now. Most fortunate for him that I am not troubled enough to stick him in a world of pain by sharing a few truths with a wider audience. Appears to be quite a few stones in a standard Hartlepool glass house!

Labels: estate-agent-fined-Property-Information-Questionnaire-HIP Home-Condition-Report Scrap-HIPs