HIPs are dead ?
All the domestic ones I've come across are simple box ticking exercises that could be done by a trained monkey. Unless he's any different, do him a favour and tell him to get a proper job.
MBQ
Yes. While energy assessment is a good idea in principle, there's a big difference between, yes, house has DG, good - , and does house have *effective* DG?
You really need to measure things under adverse conditions, such as a howling north wind at -5C, such as we had last winter. This showed:
1) no sealing around where soil pipe exited bathroom 2) bathroom ceiling fan fixture allows air to be blown back in when fan not on 3) various DG windows leaking air inwardsNone obvious to the box-ticker, but all contributing to piss-poor energy-efficiency of house.
I didn't say he agreed with it. But he is making money out of it ;-) Simon.
Good - one bit of pointless crap shoved in the bin. Several thousand more to go...
Pity Cameron hasn't grown enough balls yet to tell the EU to stuff the Energy Assessment up Von Rompui's backend....
Energy bit is an EU requirement. Needs a FLIR camera to do it properly, particularly CWI which is qualitative not just quantitative if someone tries a rush job.
Tell him to get a conscience, then ;-)
MBQ
Overall after buying and selling a house, switching some of the search requirements from the potential multiple buyers to one seller I found an good thing. The energy survey was always at most a finger in the air waving thing.
So while I was initially negative about HIPs, I thought there were some positive aspects. A buyer's solicitor would also charge more for making the same searches.
They were a great idea (do the legwork once, by the seller, beforehand) but like energy certificates (Don't buy this house if it has the wrong lightbulbs, and wind turbines are a good idea) they were a pitiful implementation that delivered no useful benefit afterwards.
So instead of fixing it, we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Probably through some heat-recovery greywater system.
The housing minister was interviewed on You and Yours (Radio 4, just after midday). I only caught the end of it, but they are planning on using the EPC for some future legislation relating to carrying forward cost of energy saving measures over long payback periods.
EU never required the EPC. It merely required governments to gather some overall statistics on the energy efficiency of the housing stock. This could be based on the sampled surveys local authorities have to do anyway. However, it was converted into gold plated bollocks in this country, as is very often the case.
Basically yes. Its a bureaucratic overhead that neither totally reassures the buyer (like a proper survey should) nor helps the seller sell.
Pure job creation and no real benefit.
Best to scrap the whole thing and look again at how we trade houses, if its truly broken.,. BUT was it ever broken? I don't think it was.. In fact, I cant recall what issues it was supposed to solve, if any.
My thoughts exactly. No doubt the next government will reinstate the baby plus some extra bathwater. And so we go on
For f*ck's sake js.b1 - will you PLEASE not cut out all of the message(s) that you're replying to. Cutting superfluous text is good netiquette but someone coming along later needs SOME form of context for your postings to make sense. You're taking the time and effort to sit at the keyboard and type, so presumably you want someone to read what you're saying. Please make it easier for us to do so.
Trading houses is at least fractured if not bust, IMO.
Buying/selling in the US was made much easier for me by the fact that the (binding) contract is signed at the beginning of the process (therefore no gazumping possible).
In the UK you don't reach that point until much later in the process (and often not until completion day).
In our case we were (in our view) screwed by the buyers who waited until late in the process and then sprang some demands based on the survey (and they had the information much earlier in the process). So I would say how about a strict timetable:
1) initial agreement and price settled subject to survey, but seller prevented from accepting another offer (prevents gazumping) 2) buyer then has three weeks to get survey done and notify seller of any defects he wants remedied or price reduced because of. 3) after three weeks no price alterations or defect considerations possible, but another two weeks allowed for confirming any title questions and questions related to environmental issues 4) After five weeks, then, or earlier by agreement, *automatic* exchange of contracts and buyer is locked in. During the five weeks buyer can pull out at any time.If/when I sell a house again I'm gonna unilaterally make the above be my framework anyway.
It would also help if the set of documents the seller fills in could be more standardised and available by download. That way a seller can start working on those the minute you think about putting the house on the market.
I doubt it. Many political failures are washed up on the sands of time, never to be gathered up again.
As a bit of an aviation buff, there are so many strange planes out there that never ever made the light of day: for every ten that get pencilled up, or 6 that make prototype, only one ever makes it to production, and less than 10% of those are really useful planes that have long service lives.
I think the DC3 is probably the longest service type there is. 70 years plus and a few still going..
See? there's a classic example of something that can be fairly esily fixed without any costs and without a HIPS.
And go for fixed legal fees. To avoid lawyers having mutually profitable arguments over which way round the kitchen taps ought to be, etc.
What I've found when selling houses is that the buyer makes an offer and on acceptance requests that I take it off the market, yet they continue to look and sometimes on finding a 'better deal', I get dumped. Does the above allow me to take the buyer off the market, i.e., stop looking?
mark
That is interesting... So I wonder why Cameron didn't scrap the EA and make a clean deal of it?
Good question. The above as I've written it commits the seller but not the buyer, at the initial stage. In the US you haggle for a day or two once it looks like you're both serious, but then you sign and exchange at that point. I can't remember, though, whether or not people do the survey before or after this. The contract can still say "subject to survey" and "subject to the buyer getting a mortgage", but the point is that once you've signed, the buyer has limited room to get-out, and the seller has none. I mean, you can break the contract but there are penalties (like, 10% of the contract price or whatever).
So right at the start you've eliminated the major defects we suffer from here.
well it doesnt eliminate the worst one we had selling the mothers house: Namely 6 weeks of delay prior to a deal being struck at a price while layers haggled over this or that bit of paper work, and the buyer used every one as an excuse to negotiate the price down.
AFTER it had been taken off the market. Fortunately, in a rising market as it was, there was pressure on him to get on with it.
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