Anyone selling a house will have to spend up to £1,000 providing an information pack for buyers as part of a shake up of the housing market to be published by the Government.
Under the new regulations, from spring 2007, anyone selling a home will have to provide potential buyers with a sheaf of documents including evidence of ownership, local authority searches and a new “home condition report” before they can put their house on the market. Opposition politicians and industry groups have said that the plan would create an army of unregulated pack providers who could exploit both buyers and sellers. Furthermore, most buyers will not trust the report of a home inspector paid by the seller and will end up paying for their own survey.
This scheme is supposed to help speed up the process of buying a property and stop gazumping when in truth, the majority think it will have no impact on these two issues. Instead, sellers will be saddled with an extra cost of up to £1,000; mortgage lenders will probably demand their own assessments and many buyers will want their own survey instead of the one they have been given.
The draft regulations also show that the Government has decided to go ahead with a medium-level home condition survey costing an average £350 against the advice from the RICS. Home inspectors would have to be trained for at least 18 months and existing surveyors would also have to re-train before they would be allowed to carry out inspections. Because the certification requirement for inspectors ios the same whether you are an experienced surveyor or a man on the street (as anyone can become a home inspector), there is every chance that a seller who fears something is wrong with his home will commission the latter to do his survey.
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