Background
Home Information Packs are intended to improve the home buying and selling experience for consumers and to reduce the carbon emissions from homes. The current home buying and selling process is slow, expensive and uncertain. Moreover, most buyers are provided with little or no information about the energy efficiency of the home they are considering buying.
This has been confirmed most recently by the HIPs Baseline research, conducted in summer 2006 by the Building Research Establishment and Ipsos MORI.
The key conclusions were:
- The average (mean) transaction time from marketing to completion was over 6.5 months. Median transaction times were nearly 5 months. 1 in 4 takes 9 months or longer.
- The average time from "offer agreed" to "exchange of contract" was 81 days - about 10 days longer than in 1998
- The average cost of a completed transaction was £1,546, with first-time buyers paying slightly more
- 23% of buyers who had completed a transaction experienced at least one failed transaction during the course of their most recent house buying and selling experience
- Where a transaction fails at a sufficiently late stage between offer and exchange the buyer's wasted costs are typically over £1000
Moreover, research by the Energy Savings Trust has shown that:
- Our homes account for 27% of the UK's carbon emissions contributing to global climate change
- The average home owner would save around £300 in fuel bills by making their home more energy efficient
