Draft paper INTRODUCING A COMPLETE NEW LAND REGISTER & E-CONVEYANCING SYSTEM A description of the complete renewal of the Dutch Land Register & e-conveyancing system JACOB VOS1 BERNARDUS HENDRIKUS JOHANNES ROES2 [email protected] [email protected] 1 Registrar at Kadaster 2 Chief registrar at Kadaster Draft paper to present at the “2020 WORLD BANK CONFERENCE ON LAND AND POVERTY” The World Bank – Washington DC, March 16-20, 2020 Copyright 2020 by author(s). All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. 1 Introduction The Land Register in the Netherlands has a new heart at its core. The final transition from the old to the new IT system was completed on 17 October 2018. The obsolete system for maintaining the Land Register was replaced by a new and future-proof one called ‘KOERS’. It was a major operation: 1.3 TB of data, 10.1 million cadastral objects and 8.2 million mortgages and seizures were migrated. Successfully. More than a year on the re- newed Land Register turned out to have far exceeded its expectations. The implementa- tion of business rules caused the quality of data in the real estate chain to increase while, despite the extra quality guarantees, the timeliness of the registration process remain high. This article will describe the need for the Dutch Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency – in short, Kadaster – to renew the Land Register. It will then explain the specific requirements for the new ICT system and what this meant for the real estate chain. The approach and method of renewal will then be discussed, along with how the new system went live and how the migration of all data was handled. As a matter of course there will be a description of the lessons learned and success factors of the project. A start has been made on renewing the way documents are delivered to the Deed Register, now that the Land Register has been renewed. We are currently hard working on a com- pletely new way of delivering documents, that will benefit the way documents are pro- cessed in the new Land Register. Unlike the (earlier) renewal process of the Land Regis- ter, where only the output of the system – in the shape of information products – and the planning of the implementation touched the external parties, the renewal of the system in which deeds, seizures and other documents are submitted to the Land Register for regis- tration touches the external parties directly, which is why Kadaster is realising this pro- ject in close cooperation with the various stakeholders. 2 Motive The registration system for maintaining the Land Register, also called the Key Land Register (‘BRK’ in its Dutch acronym) dates back to 1990. It was the Kadaster’s first digital registration system. Maintaining the Land Register (now called BRK) had previ- ously occurred manually. The system was technically outdated, using technology from the 1980s. The moment that the system could no longer be maintained came ever closer, with at one hand a technology that became out of date and on the other hand expertise for per- forming maintenance that became more and more scarce. This posed an ever-increasing risk to the Land Register’s continuity. Neither could the old system meet the requirements set by its users. Changes in the law or justified wishes of users sometimes required functional adaptations, but it was increasing- ly difficult to build this new functionality into the existing registration system. For example, the old registration system did not allow for the possibility of stacking more than three rights in rem on a plot (stacked rights). This despite the fact that growing num- bers of building technologies had been applied in recent decades, whereby the different parts of buildings no longer had straightforward interconnections, but appeared to be in- geniously intertwined. Architectural masterpieces, which then had to be given a legal jacket. Growing numbers of three-dimensional situations were thus being described in notarial deeds, where property rights are combined to assign rights to persons in spaces above and below each other. An unlimited stacking of rights in rem on the plot was therefore a prerequisite for improv- ing the accessibility of these constructions in the Land Register. It was also no longer sufficient for the registration system to function as a kind of stand- alone transaction system. Instead it had to be flexible and able to establish links with oth- er registrations, so as to reflect the current legal status of a plot of land, with rights and rightholders, in all situations and under all circumstances. This was mainly due to the fact that, since 2008, the Land Register had been designated as a so-called key register, to- gether with, among other things, the key register of persons by the municipalities and the trade register of the Chamber of Commerce. This designation to key register meant that governments were obliged to use data from other key registers if such data was deemed to be authentic in the other registers. For example, in terms of the personal data of 3 rightholders, the land registry is obliged to keep this data up to date by linking with the key register of persons. In the future, an actual connection will also make it possible to modernise the links further, and to set them up based on the principle of obtaining data directly from its source. Finally, the old Land Register system did not adequately support the fully automatic pro- cessing of documents. Certainly, documents were offered in a way that made fully auto- matic processing possible, but from a technical system aspect, it was still not possible to process these documents in a single process step. The processing of these documents was handled partially automatic; the data was presented to the employees in their screens, af- ter which with a few manual handling it was recorded in the Land Register1. The new registration system has solved this problem, in a way that the data can be processed fully automatically in a single process step. Renewal of the registration system was therefore extremely necessary to guarantee conti- nuity, increase the flexibility of the system and reap the benefits of efficient collection. What has been achieved? The new ‘KOERS’ registration system is based on and offers the possibility of the auto- matic processing of documents based on business rules that are previously defined. In the old system, a part of the deeds were offered by means of so-called style sheets, also called KIK deeds2. By using stylesheets in the Dutch Deed Register (since 2008), scruti- nizing of the deeds, fulfilling the checks and requirements for registration purposes and to a certain extent checking on meeting specific conditions is done in an automated way. These deeds are suitable for automated processing, and currently constitute more than 40% of the total work load. The remaining 60% of the deeds are assessed by an employee (checking requirements for recording deeds) and after accepting and recording the deed, 1 Unlike the data that are recorded in the Land Register, the document itself is recorded in the Deed Register. Both are maintained by Kadaster 2 For an extended description of the KIK deeds that are based on stylesheets: VOS et al (2017). / Vos, Jacob, Lemmen, Christiaan and Beentjes, Bert, Blockchain-based Land Administration; feasible, illusory or a pana- cae?, paper presented at the 2017 World Bank Conference on land and Poverty, The EWorld Bank, Washington DC, March 20-24, 2017. 4 the essentials of the deed are processed manually. The employee then has to make various choices in terms of processing the deed and the registration. Since October 2018, fully automatic processing of KIK deeds became possible in the new registration system. Uptill the moment of implementation of the new system and despite the fact that the data of the KIK deeds was suitable to be processed fully automatically, the employee still had to deliver partial manual processing by making choices in the sys- tem based on processing rules. In making these choices the employee had a certain free- dom and interpretation space. This is now a thing of the past. For the 60% of the deeds that remained, these choices are now made automatically based on the data in the deeds regarding subjects, objects and rights that have been entered manually to the system by the employee. The system than processes this data automatical- ly. This is possible because all processing rules have been elaborated in business rules. These business rules are a translation of business processes and procedures and can be applied automatically. In addition, KOERS is also based on the principle that data may only be accessed once it has been validated. In the old system, an item was included in the registration stating that checks had not yet been fully completed. Only when all documents of a certain date had been processed throughout the country, this message was removed. A different working method has been in place following KOERS. All documents offered are kept per object, and when a document is processed, a 100% check is carried out immediately as to wheth- er the objects show a correct reference to the deed. In other words: where the old system first made data accessible and then checked, KOERS makes only validated data accessi- ble, where accessibility occurs after necessary checks have been performed. This working method makes it possible to indicate the current legal status of the parcel for each object, and provides quicker certainty as to how the legal acts included in a registered item have been registered.