Agency app launches material information report

HOP (the Home Owner’s Passport) has released its upgraded material information report to support agents with Trading Standards compliance.

The list of Material Information minimum requirements was extended from 3 to 22 categories at the end of last year and now includes information ranging from flying freeholds to rights and restrictions.

Sally Holdway, director at HOP and an ex-conveyancing solicitor, said the time it takes to gather all this information is causing nervousness among agents around potential delays to getting properties to market. 

Not only has the list been extended to 22 categories, but each of these sections can potentially surface a raft of further detail which will be required; and all of this needs to comes from multiple different sources, she said.

Holdway added: “What’s interesting about material information is that there is a huge overlap with the conveyancing requirements. 

“The vast majority of Parts A B and C can be found in the contract pack documentation, and its information which lawyers have been used to collating and reviewing for years. 

“This is the approach we have taken in HOP. The system gathers together the information from trusted sources such as HM Land Registry and does so to existing Law Society Protocol Standards. This information can then be repurposed to satisfy the Trading Standards requirements.

“Helpfully, because we collate the information to the required conveyancing standards it also means that agents can kill two birds with one stone.”

The information that populates the material information report is also used to auto generate a contract pack, which can be issued on the same day an offer is accepted. This helps to streamline the conveyancing process and saves lawyers up to 20% of their time on a sale transaction, HOP claims.

Holdway said: “Agents are also expressing concerns about how to distil the reams of documentation into a format which isn’t hundreds of pages long, like the lever arch files full of documents we used to have in home information packs. It needs to be available to quickly and effectively upload into the portals.

“We’ve worked hard to address both these concerns in our upgraded material information solution. The HOP system auto collates the required information in under an hour and presents it in pdf report which can be added to agents’ sales particulars. Crucially we also provide it in a format which can be directly uploaded into the portals via APIs.”