Monday 2 February 2009

HIPS - still a waste of time or a bonus in tough times?

It has been a while since we have commented on the HIPS market. Indeed, I wrote it off a while back and was just waiting for this government or the next to scrap it.

But I have been hearing positive stories of agents making money from HIPS. Granted, I also hear persistent comments that they are useless and customers could not care less about them and they do nothing to assist anyone. But given the law dictates that one needs to be in existence, why not make some money out of the useless exercise?!

Of course, this hardly enhances the images of agents, who will ultimately foot the blame from the end user. That said, being commercially minded is not a crime, especially when you are delivering a product that is forced upon you.

Passion is still running high on this one and the EATs recent post confirming that a Tory government would abolish HIPs has generated 49 comments on Friday and 26 yesterday! Admittedly, some of these comments are of the normal flavour found in the EAT forums, but nevertheless passion is running deep.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

From our experience it’s been a waist of time. Some clients have even been put off of putting there property up for sale because of this initial cost. Where as in the past these clients may have just put their property up to see what happened, they are now not bothering. Sols still do the work anyway...