EPCs are to remain however; good news for all those who spent thousands of pounds training to become Energy Performance Assessors. Personally, I have found the EPC the most useless part of the HIP pack from a conveyancing point of view. Although I understand they will continue in an attempt to improve energy efficiency, I have yet to speak to a client who has actually read, understood and actioned or proposed to action anything contained in the EPC.

The HIP might not be as useful to you as you might think. The standard documents that have to be provided to your conveyancing solicitor are;-

1) Energy Performance Certificate
2) Copies of the electronic register held at HM Land Registry proving ownership of the property by the sellers, together with a copy of the Land Registry filed plan.
3) Local Land Charge Search result.
4) Water & Drainage Search result.

Firstly, when your conveyancing solicitor looks at the HIP, they may still have to ask the sellers for extra deeds. In the electronic register, reference might be made to other deeds that are of particular importance, deeds that create rights or create obligations that would become legally binding upon you and your conveyancing solicitor will need to see them. Unfortunately, full details of these deeds are not always set out in the register.

You might think that such deeds would be provided in the HIP as a standard requirement. Not so! Usually however, you don’t need to pay for copies of these deeds, they will be obtained and provided by the seller’s conveyancing solicitor.

The second issue is the search results. It depends upon the date of the searches as to whether or not new ones are needed. If you’re getting a mortgage, then the mortgage lender will only allow your conveyancing solicitor to accept searches that are up to 6 months old at the date of moving (i.e. the completion date). If the property has been on the market for a while, the conveyancing solicitor might advise that you should get further search results, which obviously, you will have to pay for. Bear in mind that the entries revealed in a search are only valid as at the date the search was undertaken and more entries might be made in the months following. (More information is available in my separate articles relating to each search).

Certain mortgage lenders will only accept searches that have been undertaken through the relevant statutory bodies i.e. the Local Authority (Council) and the local Water Provider. In my area, this will be the Middlesbrough, Redcar or Stockton on Tees Council and Northumbrian Water.

The reason I mention this is because when the seller pays for the HIP, it is often cheaper for them if the searches are undertaken through a private agent. These searches are known as “personal searches”. Whilst this is great for them, those buying a house may find themselves with a mortgage lender (Darlington Building Society, HSBC, First Direct to name a few) that won’t accept them. Your conveyancing solicitor then has to ask you to authorise him to undertake new searches that are acceptable to your lender i.e. through the statutory bodies and you will have to pay for this.

So, whilst the aim of the HIP was to speed up the conveyancing process and to save money for those potentially buying a house, you need to be aware that there are circumstances in which the HIP is pretty useless and that you may have to pay more money out to supplement the information in them!

Your conveyancing solicitor’s obligations to the mortgage lender when you are buying a house are explained in a separate article.