Terms, Conditions & Information
Hip Direct business principles:- We will always be honest and upfront.
- We keep our costs low, take a modest margin and pass on savings to the customer.
By using this site or sourcing a Home Information Pack through us, you agree to be bound by the following terms and conditions (we have the right to revise and amend these terms and conditions from time to time). You will be subject to the terms and conditions in force when your order for a Home Information Pack to be supplied has been accepted:
1. What is in your HIP?
Your HIP includes all mandatory documents as specified below.
Index – a simple index of the contents of the pack.
Sale Statement – this is a component of the HIP to be completed by the seller describing the property for sale in simple terms. When you place your order, we ask you a few questions about your property. The answers you give go to make up the Sale Statement which is automatically created by the system. It’s your responsibility to ensure that all information given is accurate and correct.
Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) - As part of the HIP you need an EPC. To do this you need a nice man or a nice lady (we employ both) with a clipboard and tape measure to pop round to the property to measure up, poke their head into the loft, check out your boiler and generally scrabble about looking at all your heating and insulation. Whenever possible we use our own in-house qualified, accredited and Criminal Records Bureau-checked Domestic Energy Assessors who will arrange a mutually convenient time to pop round a carry out the inspection. The upshot of this is that your property will then be given a certificate to show prospective buyers exactly how snug and cheap to heat your house is.
Note our standard price includes only an EPC for an existing dwelling. New Build properties (including newly converted properties) require a more in-depth New Build EPC for which we’ll quote separately and will increase the price of the HIP.
Local Search - Local searches are provided by private search companies (or personal search companies) these are backed by Search Report Insurance Policies.
The prices shown on this site are for a HIP with a Personal Search (as are the prices on pretty well everyone else’s HIP pack sites). If you require a Local Authority Search, we’ll have to find out the additional price for you. Please note however, our Personal Searches are entirely legal for inclusion into your HIP pack.
Drainage & Water Search - A search done by your local water utility company showing water and sewerage information relevant to your property. Makes fascinating reading.
Land Registry Documents – Title Plan & Register. Basically these show the location of the property for sale on a map, as well as who the property is legally registered to. Please note that occasionally a property may have a couple or more title documents relating to it lodged at the Land Registry. Only the documents specific to the dwelling at the address given will be recovered. If there are extra documents that are required to go into the HIP (such as a plot of land next to the house) covered by a different title register, then you need to notify us at the time of ordering and a small surcharge may apply for recovering theses additional documents.
Other Documents
Leasehold – If a copy of the lease is not on file at the Land Registry then you may be asked to provide a recent copy of the lease (assuming you have access to it – you should have been provided or at least seen a copy when you originally purchased the property). There’s also a land registry Office Copy of title plan & register associated with the lease which need to be requested from the Land Registry. The additional cost for completing the Leasehold part of the HIP is on the website.
Unregistered Properties – older properties didn’t always need to be registered with the Land Registry so some come up as ‘unregistered’ when the HIP is being compiled. In this case, some extra work may need to be done to provide the necessary docs – Epitome of Title and other types of proof to show who the property is registered to. This can involve a good amount of leg-work so there is an extra charge of £25.00 + VAT in these cases. The customer is required to retrieve these documents from either their conveyancer or the mortgage lender involved in the original purchase (since they’ll have been required to establish ‘good title’ when the original purchase went through). Documents provided by the customer can be incorporated as proof of good title but it’s the customer’s responsibility to produce adequate and appropriate documents to prove this – possibly through a conveyancer.
2. Prices
Our Basic prices are shown on the website and are kept up to date there. Should your HIP require something you’ve not paid for (such as we find out it’s not registered and you paid for a registered HIP) we’ll let you know and you will be required to pay the difference. In the majority of cases things go swimmingly and are completely straightforward but you need to know that, until the HIP kicks off, we won’t know for sure... Please also see the section above for Unregistered Properties (properties not registered at the Land Registry) as these also incur a surcharge.
3. The Website
We’ll do everything we can to keep the website up and running and all services available 24/7. However, problems do arise and we therefore reserve the right to withdraw the service at any time without notice. We’re also actively working on improving our service all the time so reserve the right to change the site and it’s functionality at any time and without notice. By using this site and our services, you agree to this.
4. Payment
All major credit and debit cards (VISA, VISA Electron, MasterCard, Switch/Maestro, and Solo) are accepted. Cheques are also accepted (please contact us if you want to pay by cheque so we can provide you the details of who to make it payable to and where to send it to.)
When paying by cheque, the cheque has to clear before the sourcing and commissioning of the HIP can commence.
A 10 month differed HIP payment facility is also available at a cost of £55.00 +VAT (Please contact us directly if you wish to make use of the deferred payment facility – To make use of this service you will need to be able to provide the details of a valid credit card that is in your own name.)
5. Commissioning your HIP
Once payment has been made and you provide us with the correct details of the house to be sold, we’ll source and arrange for the HIP to be commissioned. In order to legally market your home in England & Wales, you have to have commissioned a HIP. Therefore, on commissioning your HIP we’ll provide you with a confirmation email – along with other sundry information of what you’ve ordered, how much it will cost and so on. At the time of ordering, we request accurate information about the address of the property requiring the HIP. It is entirely your responsibility to give us correct information. If you give us incorrect information (whether on the phone, by email or within the Sales Statement) causing a HIP to be created for the wrong address or property, you agree you are liable for the full value of the incorrect HIP.
Similarly, if your property turns out to be leasehold and you’ve only paid for a freehold HIP, then you’ll have to pay the difference. Same goes for unregistered properties. If however you pay for a leasehold HIP and it turns out to be freehold, then we’ll begrudgingly pay you back the extra. We reserve the right to moan about it though.
The price given on the website at the time of ordering is the price to be paid (whether a previous quote at a lower price has been given or not). Once you pay for your HIP, this constitutes the start of a contract between us.
6. Communications
Note that e-mail is our primary and preferred source of communication, so we ask that you monitor your designated email account regularly throughout the HIP process or something might be missed, resulting in a delay of your HIP. This includes setting your junk e-mail settings or spam settings to accept e-mails from our hipdirect.net addresses. We promise that if you do this, we’ll not try and sell you Viagra or porn as everyone else on the interweb seems bent on doing. We will make every attempt to contact you but if after 3 e-mails and 3 phone calls to your nominated e-mail address and phone number without success, we reserve the right to wait for you to call us. This may of course slow down the completion of your HIP.
7. Delivery
HIPs usually take around 10 working days to deliver. Sometimes they take longer (such as the time that a certain Water Board Co crashed their computer for several weeks without telling anyone!) but they sometimes take less time too. 5 days is the quickest time we’ve seen a HIP produced - which caused at least one raised eyebrow in this office I can tell you. We’re a demonstrative lot here at HipDirect. So, to clarify, there are 3rd party deliverables that form part of your HIP which are out of our control and we therefore can’t guarantee any specific time to complete a HIP. Every endeavour is made to deliver the HIP to you as soon as possible.
Your HIP will be delivered to you as an Adobe PDF file via email (we can also arrange to send you a printed copy but this costs (£11.75 +VAT) extra. We try to keep everything electronic to reduce costs, save trees and because it’s all really convenient and nice and simple. Except when things go wrong of course, when we crawl under the desk and burn effigies of Bill Gates for inventing Microsoft Windows. But doesn’t everyone do that?
Once you take delivery of your HIP (for the purposes of this agreement by any means requested) this constitutes the fulfilment of our contract and both parties agree that the contract has ended. Note that your completed HIP is ordinarily delivered to you via the e-mail address that you provided to us, and when it is delivered we urge all customers to check their HIP and notify HipDirect of any problems (see below)
One other thing worth noting is that according to the HIP legislation there is a concept of ‘the responsible person’ which is usually denoted as the vendor or estate agent who is responsible for the contents of the HIP. The finished HIP is always checked to ensure all documents are the appropriate ones to your property and to try and catch any complexities which may be relevant to the sale of your property, you need to take an interest too – and study the finished HIP to ensure you’re happy with the accuracy of the reports. If you find any problems with it, don’t hesitate to give us a shout and we’ll do what we can to help – be it arranging for alternative documents to be gathered, or information to be edited &/Or a reissue of the HIP. If it’s our fault, we’ll do it free of charge of course.
8. Compensations & Cancellations
Once you’ve paid for the HIP, 3rd party reports are immediately commissioned and therefore costs are immediately incurred. For that reason, we’re reluctant to accept cancellations. If you need to cancel a HIP there will have been 3rd party costs incurred so while we will halt any further work, there will be some costs immediately payable. However, we’re nice people and will do what we can to stop any further costs so please contact us asap so we can discuss the work which has been done and how much is reasonable to repay.
9. Access to the property.
We need access to your property to carry out the EPC. If we can’t gain access to your property after making reasonable attempts to arrange an appointment time or if we make an appointment and you don’t turn up, we reserve the right to produce the HIP, not including the EPC, and charge the full amount. As an alternative to this, you can pay an additional standard amount for the EPC, as found on our website, and we will re-commission the EPC and include it in the pack.
10. Problems & Complaints
We try and make the HIP procurement and buying process as simple as possible. However we recognise that sometime things can go wrong. Our limit of liability for production of the HIP is limited to the price paid for the HIP and we try and resolve any disputes through chatting and reason. If you have a problem with our service, please give us a call in the first place and we’ll try and do everything we can to resolve it. Also, please put your concern in writing and e-mail it to: ross@hipdirect.net and Cc: mark@hipdirect.net and we’ll take it from there. We always do our best to resolve problems amicably.
11. Penalties
If we have made our 3 e-mail requests & 3 phone calls (all communications are logged) requesting information back from you and you haven’t replied, after 28 days the HIP will be produced without the relevant requested items being included. In fact, there are legal requirements that require that action to be taken. After this point, if you provide the required information (such as a fully completed Sales Statement) we reserve the right to charge a £20 supplement.
Similarly, if we can’t gain access to the property because of the vendor either not contacting us, refusing entry or pushing back the appointment time on more than two occasions, we reserve the right to request that the HIP is produced without the EPC. The EPC is a mandatory component of the HIP, so if the customer then requires the EPC to be carried out and a new HIP to be compiled, this will incur a charge of £50.
12. Withdrawal of Property from Market
The period of grace for producing a HIP for your property is 28 days. If you have delayed the completion of any of the mandatory components of the HIP for any of the reasons contained within this document, and therefore the HIP isn’t in place, you are obliged to withdraw your property from the market until the HIP is complete. If mandatory documents are available, then you can request a partially-complete HIP to be provided, pending the completion of the full HIP.
13. Completion of Order
On delivery of your HIP to your e-mail inbox your order is deemed complete and your contract with HipDirect is fulfilled. We’ll then skip off down the local hostelry and spend the sixpence we’ve made on sourcing your HIP on a ½ pint of shandy and 6 straws. That should leave enough for us to all to buy a sherbet dip on the way home.
If you kindly provide us with a testimonial, we’ll probably put it on the website. You agree to us using your testimonial but we’ll keep your exact identity a secret – so we’ll use your quote and attribute it using vague terms such as… Joe, Hersham.
14. Third Party Reports
HIPs contain 3rd party reports. In fact most of the HIP is made up of 3rd party reports so by sourcing a HIP through us, you agree to us disclosing any necessary relevant information to a 3rd party to allow them to create the HIP documents and the completed HIP.
Where 3rd Party Reports are obtained on your behalf, you acknowledge and agree that this is being done via parties acting as your agent, and those agents shall be permitted to disclose any necessary information to any relevant 3rd party from whom any Third Party Reports are obtained. As such, the contract for the provision of such 3rd Party Reports will be between you, as the disclosed principal and the provider of the 3rd Party Report / HIP provider and we at HipDirect are not a party to any such contract we make as your agent and we cannot sue or be sued upon it.
All reasonable endeavours to obtain any required Third Party Reports for you from suitably qualified and experienced third parties will be made via parties whom we reasonably believe have the relevant degree of expertise and appropriate professional standing to provide such reports, you acknowledge that we are not liable for the contents of any Third Party Reports and/or any delay, errors or omissions by any third party providing such Third Party Reports.
You agree to indemnify us against all costs, claims, damages, losses and expenses arising as a result of any claim or action suffered by us in the event that we are deemed to be acting as your agent in obtaining any Third Party Reports for you or performing our other obligations under a Contract.
15. Our Liability
We shall not be liable for any use made of your Home Information Pack or any information contained in it by third parties (whether fraudulently or otherwise) once your Pack has been made available to the public, whether via our website or otherwise.
We may make changes to the material on this site, or to the products, services and prices described in it, at any time without notice. The material on this site may be out of date.
The material on this website is provided ‘as is’ without any conditions, warranties or other terms of any kind.
We accept no liability for any loss of income or revenue, loss of business, loss of profits or contracts, loss of anticipated savings, loss of data, waste of management or office time or for any indirect or consequential loss or damage of any kind however arising and whether caused by tort (including negligence), breach of contract or otherwise, even if foreseeable.
You agree to indemnify us fully, defend and hold us, and our officers, directors, employees and agents, harmless from and against all claims, liability, damages, losses, costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of any breach of these terms and conditions or any Contract by you, or your use of this site, or the use by any other person using your registration details or in any circumstances where we are held to be your agent.
16. Miscellaneous
These Terms & Conditions will change from time to time so please see the relevant page on our website to get the latest copy.
Links to third party websites on this site are provided solely for your convenience. If you use these links, you leave this site. We have not reviewed all of these third party websites and do not control and are not responsible for these websites or their content or availability and you use such third party websites entirely at your own risk.
When using our site, you accept that communication with us will be mainly electronic. We will contact you by e-mail or provide you with information by posting notices on our site. You agree to this and you acknowledge that all contracts, notices, information and other communications that we provide to you electronically comply with any legal requirement that such communications be in writing. This condition does not affect your statutory rights.
By using our website, you agree to be bound by these terms & conditions.