Only five per cent of the interviewed are satisfied with how the property rights registry for real estate works – research results

Activists conduct an opinion poll among journalists to get feedback on the rights registry for real estate. Among the top changes expected are technical aspects, regrouping of information in accordance with its usage as well as procedural changes. 

Kyiv, September 23, 2016. Biggest part of entries to the State registry of rights on real estate until 2012 is stored at the Bureau of technical inventory in paper form. The registry does not contain the data on the previous owner, description of the real estate, and the items that were not subject to change remain on paper only. These conclusions were presented by Lyudmyla Pankratova, media lawyer at the NGO Institute for development of regional media, following the registry’s analysis. “Only five per cent of the interviewed journalists were satisfied with the registry’s work. Rest of the interviewed responded in the following way: 47 per cent think that the registry lacks information, 33 per cent are unsatisfied with the search engine, 10 per cent – with the interface. Everyone has already accepted the fact that access to the registry is paid, although there is no explanation for that, five per cent of the respondents named it as a drawback,” said Pankratova.

According to her, results of the analysis demonstrate the lack of information about the previous owner of real estate. “We can see the real estate object, the pretext how it became owned, but we cannot see the information about who this property belonged to earlier,” noted Pankratova. As to the real estate that is not subject to change, it will stay on paper. “People who bought the real estate before 2004 are actually not getting into the registry,” the media lawyer said.

Another unexpected discovery is that many entries were made during after hours. While notaries public who are located in one place often register the actions that are taking place in a different location.

Pankratova suggested the following changes that would improve the registry’s work. To group the information based on the object’s owner, to update the address list, to lift the limit on the use of one bank card for inquiries, to change the format from the existing pdf and to introduce the application programming interface (API). “You pay UAH 17,00 for one query and save it as a photo, you cannot use it for other purposes. It makes it impossible to integrate the data received into other information systems,” explained Pankratova.

The suggestions also included a possibility to make a query in package – in order to be able to check the real estate or owner of the multi-storied apartment house, to allow re-uploading the query, to save the properties during the entire session after the first log-in into the system, to add the information on excluding the object from the registry of property banned for alienation as well as to “teach” the system to read Latin characters as it currently does not contain the information on non-resident companies.