The bill submitted to the National Assembly for the amendment and supplement of the Cadastre and Property Register Law aims at significantly enhancing the digitization of the Property Register to optimally protect the rights of real estate owners and reduce administrative burden.
Firstly, the bill envisages the creation of a special Advisory Council to the Minister of Justice, directly engaged with the development and modernization of the Property Register. This Council will include representatives from state authorities (ministries and others), as well as from the Notary chamber, the BAR association, and other interested parties, which should ensure a balanced operation of this body and protection of the interests of private individuals and entities.
Within its electronic platform (website), the Registry Agency will provide a technical tool for creating (generating) draft acts under Article 113 of the Property Law in electronic form. These are notary deeds, partition contracts, lease agreements, and other similar documents related to rights over immovable property. It is still unclear how exactly this mechanism will function, but it is likely that the user of the service will need to enter the main parameters of the desired act/contract (e.g., data about the parties, agreed price, identification data for the immovable property, etc.), after which the system will generate a "simplified" draft of such an act, based on which, after appropriate legal consultation, the final version of the act could be prepared.
Again, in order to help individuals and increase transparency, within the individual dossiers of immovable properties in the Register, additional information will now be recorded, namely: (i) the tax evaluation of the respective immovable property, (ii) the legal ground for the transfer of ownership rights; and if the immovable property has been the subject to judicial proceedings – (iii) the number and date of the court judgement, as well as the numbers of the acts that have been contested in the proceedings. This approach - entering as detailed information as possible in one place, i.e. in the dossier of the respective immovable property, should further facilitate the so-called due diligence (legal analysis of the history of a real estate), which potential buyers usually want to have before making a purchase decision.
Further, property owners will be notified electronically by the Registry Agency about every entry in their property dossier. In certain cases, the notification will also be sent on paper to their physical address - for example, when registering a declarative notarial act for acquiring ownership rights by virtue of elapsed prescription period, since such registrations could limit or completely exclude the rights of the previous owner. When notifying electronically, officials will be able to use the phone number and email address of the person, which have been collected for other purposes by other administrative bodies.
A significant relief for private individuals and entities is also the fact that the certificates of registered circumstances, which are usually required by buyers as a precondition for concluding a transaction with real estate, will now also be available electronically, signed with a qualified electronic signature by the Registry Agency.
The necessity of presenting sketches for land plots, respectively – schemes for buildings and separate units in buildings, when filing an application for registration in the Property Register, is also being abolished. This change is justified by the fact that the officials can themselves extract the relevant data contained in the sketches (schemes) through inquiries in other electronic registers and systems.
The transitional and final provisions of the bill envisage changes in the Law on Property and Use of Agricultural Land. For instance, any entered into force decisions adopted by the municipal agriculture bodies recognizing/restoring ownership rights, will be registered officially in the Property Register without a state fee. This is another precondition for ensuring the stability of property rights, relieving citizens of unnecessary administrative burden, and gathering all relevant information about the history of the respective immovable property in one place, with a view to easier traceability.
Undoubtedly, the measures described above are an important step towards achieving the goal set in the acts at the EU level, namely - "one-stop administration" and digitization of processes, with the aim of facilitating business and ensuring an optimal investment climate.
