I have asked if, as an estate agent who is not going to prepare the actual HIP itself but hopefully work in conjunction with solicitors or a packager who will, do we still have to belong to a redress scheme? There doesn’t seem to be any need, if we are not going to be held responsible for the HIPs contents.
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Also, I am to believe that estate agents have to belong to the Ombudsman Scheme, which provides for a ‘closed shop’ as only one body is allowed at present to provide this – the Ombudsman for Estate Agents, which is run by non-experienced property professionals. It wants, on average, £150 per office, not per firm.
Why must we pay for a scheme when most of us behave ourselves?
Then there is professional indemnity insurance costs. This all mounts up, not just to small players like myself, but the large agencies are going to face a combined annual bill amounting to thousands of pounds. That does not include those who pay fees to the National Association of Estate Agents or the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors who have redress schemes anyway.
It is total nonsense.
I started my career in estate agency 38 years ago and have never known anything like this nasty, interfering government.
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The problem we all face is that we have a dishonest government, which seems to believe we all behave as badly as it does.
All the HIP will do is provide more income through taxation, fees, VAT. and an opportunity to receive feedback for the rebanding of property for Council Tax.
At the end of the day, the government will take 40 per cent in inheritance tax, plus all the fees mentioned above and those of solicitors, estate agent’s commission to sell any property, so you can say goodbye to at least half of that. And now, of course, the HIP.
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It has been this government, and perhaps the Conservatives who kept the property market alive because ‘the City’ makes a huge amount of money from lending, for example, mortgages and loans plus all those insurance policies. The US dollar, is collapsing and pound sterling will be affected. We should have joined the euro in 2000, but Tony Blair and Gordon Brown held back because they knew our economy was not good. Hence no one now wants to be the new leader of the Labour Party. It has amazed me that Labour MPs have not, en mass, defected to the Liberal Democrats because most are going to lose their seats at the next general election. But will the Tories be any better? In my view, the answer is ‘no’.
The local elections on 3 May should be interesting.
Richard F. Grant
