Landonline delays forecast

By ADAM GIFFORD

Property developers and conveyancers are being warned to expect big delays in registering and transferring titles when Land Information NZ (Linz) activates its new electronic registry in Auckland.

Linz has just put the Hamilton-based South Auckland registry into the $150 million Landonline system, covering titles from Mercer to Taupo.

Operations manager Carolina Gartner says conversion of the North Auckland registry will start in April.

The office is moving over the next few weeks from the PricewaterhouseCoopers building to Oracle Tower in Wakefield St, and staff from computer services company EDS will move in alongside to start scanning the paper archives.

Barry Green, a technical consultant with land transfer agent Beresfort Legal Agency, says the North Auckland registry contains more than 40 per cent of the country's titles, and going on the experience of other centres long delays can be expected.

"It now takes about 15 days to get a new title for a subdivision. Linz has warned us that will go to 35 days during the transition - that is the turnaround it has negotiated with the Law Society - but it could be longer," Mr Green says.

He says the time taken for registering titles through the Hamilton office has blown out to 60 days compared with the 10 it took before Landonline, but Ms Gartner claims the Hamilton average is 30 days.

Mr Green says many sale contracts, particularly for subdivisions, include time limits. "If a developer has to wait two months to get a title, buyers might find reasons to opt out."

He says Beresfort has designed a new web interface so its customers can get data they need from Landonline without going through the interface PricewaterhouseCoopers developed for Linz at great expense. "We think their interface is not user friendly," he says.

Other land-transfer agents, many of whom are former Land Registry staff, say Linz faces problems with low staff morale and a lack of experienced personnel, particularly in the Auckland office.

This is expected to make the transition process even more difficult than the turmoil experienced in other centres.

Ms Gartner denies this. "What we have done is kept the best staff."

She says staff and customers are both to blame for problems with Landonline, which Linz continues to insist is technically the best system available.

"Landonline is unforgiving in a sense because you must be very accurate about what you put in. It is a different way for staff to work.

"Customers also need to comply with the standard of work. We have a 30 per cent rejection rate of applications, because all the required [paperwork] is not supplied."