Come September, previously problematic property transfers will be simplified and finally completed, thanks to a new Land Registry bill from the Ministry of Digital Governance that was presented at the cabinet meeting earlier this week. Regulations included in the bill will focus on private properties that appear as forest land on paper, even though the areas they are located in have been since reclassified, causing owners to engage in lengthy and expensive legal battles to assert their ownership rights.
Senior officials within the Ministry of Digital Governance have reported that the new regulations will allow owners who have secured a favorable decision from an Objections Examination Committee (also known as EPEA), or whose properties do not fall within a ratified forest map, to correct the registration at the cadastral office instead of going to court.
However, local Committees have become inundated with objections against forest maps, handling over 400,000 applications, with most of them still pending from as far back as six or seven years ago. As such, the proposed regulation currently applies to few cases and does not provide a long-term solution to the accumulation of cases.
The same bill will include provisions that will help unblock sales and property transfers that were previously stunted due to minor urban planning violations. More specifically, small discrepancies between past and present square meters measurements will no longer be a roadblock for real estate transactions, as the bill establishes the ability to unilaterally amend the horizontal property ownership agreement. However, it is important to note that the Ministry has not specified what is the range of acceptable small discrepancies and what provisions will be made in the case of other owners’ rights being affected.
The square meter discrepancy issue between the actual area of a property and the contracts has made it impossible to issue the updated electronic building identity needed for transfers. This regulation modification has been a longstanding demand of the Panhellenic Property Owners Federation (also known as POMIDA), which states that a vast majority of older properties do exhibit differences between their actual square footage and what has been documented in the building permit or the initial horizontal property ownership agreement.
In order to accelerate processes, the new regulations will introduce the use of artificial intelligence in the Land Registry. The plan is for the AI system to read through the contracts, record details and make automatic recommendations, with a view to reduce the time needed for contract registration. The Ministry also stated that AI tools will be used to perform legal reviews of contracts to cut down on time spent processing more complex cases.
The proposed regulations will eliminate the outdated paper process, introducing a digital platform that will resolve issues in one-third of the time, prioritizing chronological order to avoid backlog. Digital processes will also be introduced to rectify errors in old cadastral surveys. Private engineers will have authorization to handle applications and make corrections online, for efficiency and legal validity. The deadline for completion of the new Land Registry is end of 2025, although realistically, there are many rural areas where property owners have little to none participation in the system.
