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The Association of Independent Personal Search Agents (IPSA) welcomes the findings of the Property Codes Compliance Board (PCCB) independent assessment into personal searches, but issues a warning to property professionals.

The PCCB investigation, which materialised from complaints made by those with a vested interest in undermining the private search industry, has highlighted that the initial PCCB assumption that Local Authority compiled searches could set a quality benchmark for private searches to be judged against was clearly incorrect.

Steve Davies, IPSAs CEO stated “IPSA welcomes the PCCB admittance that personal search reports compiled by its members under the IPSA Code Compliant and SearchCode schemes are every bit as accurate as Local Authority compiled searches.”

The detailed PCCB investigation via spot checks and involving Trading Standards Officers of over 900 search answers revealed no significant differences between the two types of report.

Christian Lister, IPSAs Chairman added “IPSA members are however still appalled by the heavy handed and accusatory stance taken by the PCCB in this investigation, which has alienated them even further from the IPSA membership and therefore today IPSA must issue a warning to Estate Agents and the Property Ombudsman to consider very carefully the PCCB proposal to take control and initiate doorstep and desktop compliance inspections of all Estate Agents.”

The PCCB has done nothing to combat the real problems facing the industry, by accepting unlawful charging for data and allowing industry debts by logo using accredited companies to spiral out of control, leaving the consumer with Home Information Packs that contain unusable documents.

In 2009 allegations were made of malpractice within the Personal Search Industry. The allegations were mainly made by opponents of the industry and were that the reports prepared by Personal Search Companies were inferior in quality to council searches and more widespread concern that certain firms were knowingly not buying all the required data or failing to access legitimate sources of information. In October, November and December 2009 the PCCB (Property Codes Compliance Board) carried out thorough investigations of its Code Subscribers with regards to these allegations.

Frank Finch of the PCCB today made the following statement:

‘In summary, the enquiry found no evidence to support the allegation of widespread non-compliance. Rather it confirmed that the searches sampled were substantially compliant with the relevant regulations and with the Search Code.’

A total of 58 searches, comprising 900 questions were scrutinised, with errors being found in just 3% of answers and none of these related to the substantive allegations that data was either missing or inappropriate data was being used.

Finch went on to comment on the errors by saying that they

‘Appear to result from a lack of diligence rather than deliberate attempts to short-circuit the provisions in the Code. This is borne out by the fact that these failings featured in searches conducted by both personal search firms and local authorities in roughly equal measure.’

In fact, over half of all errors or omissions identified in the exercise related to local authority reports.

This goes to prove that Council Searches are no more reliable than those provided by firms who subscribe to the Search Code.