Registration of land

The Land Registry started the registration of property in 1925 and gradually since then an increasing amount of land has been registered. Compulsory registration, initially restricted to sales and long leases, was phased in on a regional basis and in recent years registration has extended to gifts and transfers to beneficiaries of trusts and wills.

The Land Registry is keen for all landowners to register their titles and encourages this by discounting the registration fee by 25% for voluntary applications.

We have dealt with several applications for the voluntary registration of farms and estates in recent years and almost all of them have produced discrepancies that have needed to be resolved either by rectifying mistakes made in earlier conveyancing transactions or by agreement with the neighbouring landowner. Several discrepancies result from the relatively poor standard of plans used in conveyancing documents.

While everyone should consider registering their unregistered titles voluntarily, anyone contemplating a sale will be well advised to do so in advance of putting the property onto the market in order to resolve any issues in advance of the sale and offer the buyer clean registered title.