We was wrong!

Posted by Justin on May 20, 2010 in Abaddons Musings, conveyancing, estate agents, HIPs, lawyers, legal system | 0 comments Despite earlier confident predictions, Home Information Packs have been suspended with immediate effect – see here
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Home Information Packs – the latest

Posted by Justin on May 15, 2010 in Abaddons Musings, conveyancing, estate agents, HIPs, lawyers, legal system | 0 comments Thanks to Rob Hailstone of the Bold Group for this:What is the Current Position?HIPs have not been scrapped by the Election result. The law still requires a HIP to be in place to market a property. The penalties for non-compliance still apply.Grant Shapps (the new Housing Minister), has said he will not condone non-compliance by Estate Agents who fail to order HIPsGrant Shapps has committed to a...
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Home Information Packs – again

Posted by Justin on May 7, 2010 in Abaddons Musings, conveyancing, HIPs, lawyers, legal system, professionals | 0 comments With the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats “promising” to abolish HIPs, it may instead be worth considering whether they can be improved to make them good value for money.The recurrent problem we are experiencing at present is the delay in getting searches. We get sent a lot of incomplete HIPs, then have to keep checking to see whether searches are added. This seems to be because...
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Always learning, always improving

Posted by Justin on Mar 23, 2010 in Abaddons Musings, conveyancing, HIPs, lawyers, legal system, risk, training | 0 comments I spent all of today on a conveyancing CPD (continuous professional development) course in Tunbridge Wells.While most of the content was not new, it provided a forum for some interesting discussions with other solicitors about practices, procedures and attitudes to risk – and about “clients from hell”!It also left me with about a dozen possible improvements to make to paperwork...
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Referral fees – are they actively destructive?

Posted by Justin on Feb 20, 2010 in Abaddons Musings, conveyancing, cynicism, estate agents, HIPs, lawyers, legal system, service | 0 comments We are currently finding the firms that rely heavily on estate agent referrals are incredibly slow – it can take literally weeks to get a draft contract out of them, and on more than one occasion we have offered to draft the contract for them, based on the information in the Home Information PacksAssuming they are not being lazy or incredibly incompentent (though … – no,...
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Home Information Packs – yet again

Posted by Justin on Feb 16, 2010 in Abaddons Musings, conveyancing, HIPs, legal system | 1 comment With a general election looming, the Conservatives are consulting various interested parties on what to do about HIPs – abolish then, improve them or leave them as they are?My view is that, if done properly, a HIP can be a very good way of speeding up the house buying and selling process. The problem is that most sellers get a HIP because they must, and buy as cheaply as they can, instead...
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