Types of LDS property ownership and boundary data

Learn more about the types of property ownership and boundary data available on the LINZ Data Service.

The LINZ Data Service provides free access to bulk data relating to property ownership and boundaries. All property ownership and boundaries data is sourced directly from Landonline, our title and survey management system, and is updated every week.

Simplified property ownership and boundaries data

The LINZ Data Service provides a selection of simplified geospatial and non-geospatial (tabular) cadastral survey and property title datasets. These datasets contain information types (attributes) that are most useful for most data processing, GIS viewing and analysis.

Complex property ownership and boundary data

The Full Landonline Dataset is designed to cater for Toitū Te Whenua customers who need to access large volumes of complex survey and title data on a regular basis. Expertise in reading, transforming and analysing large volumes of complex data is required to successfully understand and use this data.

Types of property ownership and boundary data

Parcels

Parcel information is used to define property land rights and boundaries in New Zealand. Additional datasets relating to these parcel polygons includes references, surveys and titles, appellations and statutory actions.

Titles

Property titles data includes information about ownership, all estates, encumbrances and easements that affect a piece of land, such as mortgages, leases and right of ways.

LDS includes a series of tables that provide more detailed titles information, including a link table to make the association between parcels and titles.

Survey and coordinates

Survey and coordinates data provide cadastral survey observations, monuments (marks) and survey plan references. These datasets provide the definition for the cadastral system.

Special licence for personal data

At Toitū Te Whenua, we recognise our obligation to protect the personal information we hold from inappropriate release. We can only give you access to datasets containing personal information if your request meets the obligations of the Privacy Act 2020.

To access this data, you need to provide acceptable evidence of:

  • how you will use the data 
  • how you will store, maintain and protect the data to ensure you meet your compliance obligations of the Privacy Act 2020  
  • having read and agreed to the full terms and conditions of the LINZ Licence for Personal Data 2.3.

To read more about how to apply to access this data, please refer to the LINZ Licence for Personal Data.

LINZ Licence for Personal Data

Title to Parcel Association

The land titles and cadastral survey registries used to be separately managed, and the linkages between them relied on users interpreting the respective system appellations. Landonline brought the systems together in 2001.

As part of this implementation, the data from the historical survey and title papers systems were digitised. This conversion left inconsistencies and gaps, so a digital link between the title and survey parcels records was not possible in all instances. Since 2021, Toitū Te Whenua has been improving this title to parcel match. 

An association table was created in Landonline to allow more links to be created than Landonline could previously manage. This table supplements the original links, such as by enabling unit titles to be associated with a parcel. Where the original data was incomplete or missing, some links have come from non-official sources.

These associations are now used in all LDS layers that utilise title information, meaning that more than 99.9% of titles are now linked in some form to a parcel. We believe that the vast majority of these additional associations are correct, but there is a small chance of an error. If you find a mis-linked title/parcel combination please contact Toitū Te Whenua customer support.

The few titles which are unlinked either require investigation to make the correct link or are related to particular situations where they can’t be linked to parcels. An example of the latter would be a title of the type 'Records Embodied in the Register' that relates to mining licences over a large region of the country.