“Home Information Packs”.

For some reason this phrase strikes fear into many of the solicitors who I meet, yet it should be seen as a massive opportunity for marketing your legal practice. Home Information Packs present you with a fantastic and real opportunity to create many new conveyancing instructions for minimal expense. Are you making the most of this opportunity to grow your conveyancing department?

With only 6 weeks to go to go before Home Information Packs become reality, it is time for you to take action now.

1. Home Information Packs - reasons to love them not hate them

Home Information Packs (HIPS) are a fantastic opportunity to win new clients for solicitors. I believe that if you educate your clients correctly HIPS will ensure clients come back to you every single time they move home, before they even think of ringing around for quotes or going to see an estate agent who will refer them on for a fee.

Wouldn't you like a steady stream of conveyancing instructions from clients who already know and trust you and who are only asking you and no other solicitor for a quotation?

That would allow you to charge a proper fee for your work, to make more profit from each transaction; would'nt that be good? Of course it would, and it really is very easy to achieve.

2. An Opportunity Not To Be Missed

Most solicitors know that there biggest asset is never used, their client database. If you are advertising in local papers, you are trying to attract new business to you. If you are writing to past conveyancing clients you are communicating to clients that already know you and like you. It is so much easier to sell to these clients and perhaps more importantly to charge a reasonable fee. Yet most solicitors' clients do not hear from them from one transaction to the next. Home Information Packs provide you with the best excuse in years to write to all of your clients, especially all of your conveyancing clients from the last seven years (the average time for a house move).

3. Why You Must Educate Your Clients - NOW

At this point in time your clients know less about Home Information Packs than you do. Who is best placed to tell them about Home Information Packs? What will the Home Information Packs contain? The compulsory list includes:

A Home Information Pack Index

The Sale Statement – confirming the sellers name, the address of the property being sold, whether it is freehold or leasehold and registered or unregistered land.

An Energy Performance Certificate (this confirms on a scale of A to G how energy efficient the property is).

Evidence of the Title of the Property

Local and drainage and water searches

Additional information for leasehold and commonhold sales

Most of these documents would be prepared by you now, their trusted legal adviser. Why on earth should this change after 1st June 2007? The answer is simple, it should not. But the reality is that it will if you do nothing about it.

If you allow estate agents to market to your clients now through the local media that they can sell their house now without a pack, and that after 1st June they must go straight to an estate agent when they even think of moving, that is what your old clients will do. How will they know not to if you have not been in touch?

It is your duty as their solicitor to educate your clients. And if you comply with your duty, it WILL win you new business. Yes WILL not might, maybe, possibly, it WILL win you new clients. Isn't that what you want and need to grow and prosper?

4. Contact Your Clients Now, Before You Lose Them!

If I have convinced you that this is a good idea, and I promise you that it is, you might now be thinking how do you do it. Well I have covered that for you as well. As I mentioned my business is built totally around helping solicitors to win new business, so I like to make it as easy as possible for you to do so. I have prepared a guide that you can send to all of your clients that will be personalised with your practice details and that could be with you within two weeks, leaving you plenty of time to send it to your clients and educate them to come back to you every time they want to move home. But you must act quickly, you must take positive action to communicate with your clients now. I know that the Easter Holiday is nearly upon us all (which is why I am sending this newsletter early), but do not allow that to be an excuse to do nothing. If you are serious about having a steady stream of conveyancing clients coming back to you again and again as opposed to worrying about where the next instructions is coming from, take action now.