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The former head of the Office of Fair Trading has released a new report claiming that estate agents, letting agents and managing agents, who handle residential property, should be subjected to much more formal regulation.

Anyone can set up in business as an estate agent, but Sir Bryan Carsberg says a basic qualification is needed. He also suggests that Home Information Packs (Hips) should become voluntary.

Sir Bryan’s report, which contains 30 recommendations to improve the way the residential property market works, was commissioned last year by a number of bodies.

They included the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics), the National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA) and the Association of Residential Letting Agents (Arla).

The report’s aim was to look at ways to improve regulation, standards and methods of redress for people buying or renting property. Rics welcomed the report as the basis for “major reform” of the industry. Many people are now chooosing to work on their own homes instead of moving and they are using home improvement loans in the UK to facilitate this.

The biggest change in England and Wales to the sale of residential property has been the introduction of Home Information Packs. These were originally designed to provide much for more information upfront to potential house buyers and to cut short the often frustrating process of buying a home.

But despite saying that more information for customers is one of his key aims, Sir Bryan recommends that Hips should become purely voluntary. And he said that they should not, as was once intended, include a survey of the property that is being sold.

“It would not be helpful to introduce new measures through legislation or regulation to require the production of surveys, home condition reports or valuation reports at particular times,” he said.

“I think that the markets for estate agencies, letting agencies and managing agencies are not working well because clients are not well informed about the qualifications of different agents and about what to expect from them in the way of service,” he added.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Personal Loans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.