Survey reveals massive regional differences in time taken to compile data for home information packs

Radical regional differences have been revealed in the time it takes to compile data for home information packs.

Hastings
Credit:
Less haste in Hastings

It takes almost three weeks longer to buy a house in the slowest borough than in the fastest, according to research from HIPs services provider LMS.

Seven out of the 10 slowest councils are in the south east and include Greenwich, Hastings and Salisbury.

Hillingdon in London was named the worst borough, spending an average of 17.33 working days to provide search data. This is almost five times longer than it takes the best ranked, Crawley Borough Council, which takes an average of 3.56 days.

The national average turnaround was 7.04 days.

LMS spokesman Dominic Toller said: 鈥淭he longer a search turnaround time is, the more chance there is for a house sale to fall through. Thanks to Hip providers, there is now much greater pressure on the worst performing councils to reduce search turnaround times in order to make the house buying and selling process more efficient.鈥

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