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Conveyancing Month!

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The UK’s first monthly on-line journal dedicated to conveyancers!

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CONTENTS

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Anti - Hips Onslaught Hots Up!

Text Box: The Government’s plans to introduce compulsory HIPs on the 1st of June next year are now the subject of a concerted campaign of opposition led by the Conservative party. The first salvos came in the form of a report published last month by Oxford Economic Forecasting (OFE) on behalf GMAC RFC, the UK’s 10th largest residential mortgage lender. According to OFE, Hips would distort the market, as Britons often put their homes on the market because they wanted to trade up to a bigger property or to gauge how much they could get from buyers. The cost of the HIP (up to £1,000 by some estimates) would stall people from doing this, resulting in a loss of sales.

The HIPs and

E-conveyancing War!

Winning the HIPs and

e-conveyancing war will require careful strategy, writes Fiona Gregory

Text Box: The risks inherent in e-conveyancing and HIPs fall into two categories. The first contains all the usual suspects: compliance, file management, computer security, and the like. These should be familiar ground to firms with Lexcel accreditation or sensible internal audit standards. If a firm does not yet have robust procedures in place to address these issues, it has more to worry about than e-conveyancing and HIPs. Big issue The second – and big - issue is strategic. Lawyers have experienced nothing of this magnitude since the Land Registration Act 1925 when, unable to accept the massive change this wrought, nearly a third of solicitors retired or left the profession. There is no reason to think that HIPs and e-conveyancing will not have a similar impact.

Leadership and the

Conveyancing Industry

Text Box: The “Conveyancing Industry”, as such, does not yet exist. Instead, there exists in it’s place, a section of the legal profession, overwhelmingly made up of small firms of solicitors, who, against a background of constant and unremitting change, struggle to meet the public’s aspirations on the one hand, and make a fair living out of it on the other. In recent times, they appear - quite unfairly - to be failing on both counts. The problem of course, is that from the clients’ point of view, standards of service delivery cannot be too high; conversely, the price they are prepared to pay for the service cannot be too low, and so closing the aspiration/price gap has been a constant challenge for conveyancing solicitors.

The new fire regulations could have serious consequences

for the unwary conveyancer, reports Richard Snape

Text Box: On 1st October 2006 the Fire Precautions Act 1971 and a whole raft of employment protection fire safety legislation is due to be repealed and replaced by the responsible person in non-domestic premises requiring a fire safety risk assessment under The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. The risk assessment must be carried out by 1st October 2006 and responsible persons should therefore be carrying out such assessments well in advance, otherwise on the above date they will become a criminal and could be prosecuted.

Taking

Certainty For Granted

Text Box: Welcome to your first day in third world Britain. Imagine the scene: it’s 5 am, and you’re just getting out of bed to begin your day. Your wife has already been up since 4am, to join the other women at the stand pipe, to collect water for the days cooking and washing. You look out your bedroom window, and see her returning up your street, in a long line of other women with buckets balanced precariously on their heads. You raise the children, and then go into the garden to light the barbeque to heat water for the family breakfast. It’s a bowl of porridge. It was porridge yesterday, it’s porridge today, and - let’s face it - it’s going to be porridge tomorrow. No milk or sugar, no fancy nuts or raisins, just plain old porridge. And there are no lights, no TV, and no computers either, because just like most other days, there’s no electricity.

Cautious support for HIPs

from CML

Text Box: In a wide ranging review published this month, The Council of Mortgage Lenders has given the Government cautious support for it’s HIPs plans, but continues to express reservations, particularly in relation to the need carry out physical inspections of properties, rather than just relying on the Home Condition Report (HCR) to be contained in the HIP.

House Price Inflation Easing

Text Box: In a sudden reversal of a somewhat buoyant housing market, house prices dropped 1.2% in June according to figures released by the Halifax . House prices increased by 4.5% in the first half of 2006 with a 2.6% rise during the 2006 second Quarter . The level of activity appears to have moderated in recent months, said the bank. The number of mortgage approvals to fund house purchase during March-May 2006 was down 4% compared with the preceding three months after adjusting for seasonal factors. Property transactions in England and Wales fell for the second consecutive month in May on a seasonally adjusted basis.

Law Society Announces

Start of Dry Run

Text Box: The Law Society has announced that it’s Home Information Pack (HIP) dry run will begin later this month, on a phased geographical basis. Fifty-seven per cent of respondents to a recent ICM poll said they would be most likely to trust a solicitor to prepare a HIP, and 70 per cent said they would rely on their solicitor to interpret the information contained in the HIP. Kevin Martin, Law Society president, commented: “We have said from the outset that there must be a meaningful dry run to test all aspects of the new regime before the law changes. Feedback from firms involved in this trial will be used as we continue to stress to government the practical problems

Land Registry Announces

EFT Tender

Text Box: Land Registry has announced its intention to procure an electronic funds transfer (EFT) system which will underpin its e-conveyancing service due to be released in stages from 2007. EFT will allow money to be transferred from buyer to seller while simultaneously paying fees such as stamp duty land tax. Land Registry will then automatically update its database with the new owner’s details. The new system will remove the delays which currently prolong the registration process. EFT will need to be faster than the traditional methods of payment such as CHAPS and the provider must demonstrate that their solution is secure and provides certainty, immediacy and irrevocability in the movement of funds.