Certainty of Property Rights: Mandatory e-lodgement - Realising the Benefits

What will we do & why is this important?

By maintaining and improving the land registration system, LINZ aims to provide an accurate and up-to-date picture of legal ownership of land in New Zealand. How well this system works is critical to the confidence of users in relation to land rights and transactions. It also affects the efficiency of land transactions and associated costs. Increasing confidence and efficiency will come from lower transaction charges for electronic processing, productivity and efficiency gains that result in faster transactions, and reduced risk and greater security with less reliance on physical document security.

The shift to electronic lodgement of transactions has been a major change in the way property transactions are carried out, and represents a significant piece of continuing work for LINZ. The priority over the next three years is to ensure the programme of work is completed so the benefits of recent changes are fully realised. Specific activities include:

• consolidating processing centre functions into two main offices in Hamilton and Christchurch, and
• maintaining and expanding electronic access to all current, frequently used survey and title records via Landonline, and implementing improvements to the storage and accessibility of LINZ’s paper records.

What impact will this initiative have?

This initiative is expected to maintain the accuracy of information that underpins confident transacting, while:

• improving the efficiency of land transactions, leading to cost savings for users, shortening registration time and increasing first time compliance, and
• improving ease of access to information for users (linked to our Authoritative Land Information outcome area).