HIP to be 'mare

Selling my mum's house or preparing for it is proving to be a trickier than I thought. Although there's a few websites out there to help someone like me, Home Information Packs (HIP) are an easy bit of money making for the experts and just time-wasting red tape. There's an opportunity there for a Dummies guide I'm sure.

• The Index and Sales Statement are easy and to be honest a bit of a joke.
• The Energy Performance Certificate was reasonable to organise at the cheapest price of £82. My mum's house did averagely but the report assumed bits of it knocking the score down.
• The Title Information was slightly misleading as the Land Registry is a mind-field of confusion. It turned out that all I needed was a letter confirming it hasn't been registered so no costs involved there.
• The Drainage report should be coming soon and instead of using an official conveyancing map to draw the plot I used Google Maps - fingers crossed for that will be enough.
• The Local Search is the only thing that's doing my head in and is probably where people would give up as there's so little information out there to help. The Breckland council lady didn't really explain it well enough for my non-solicitor brain to compute but it all boiled down to a couple of forms to be completed (LLC1 and CON29) plus £105. It's these forms that have to be ordered from a legal stationers - no downloading of PDFs or Word documents. This is another extra cost as the only place I could find the LLC1 offered minimum ordering of packs of 25 at around £13 plus £6 postage.

This weekend I get to see the almost finished state of the house then onto battling estate agents at their own game with, what I'm slightly more clued up on, marketing.