19 minute read
6 Aspects to consider in the Registry - Cadastre Integration
By GOLGI ALVAREZ
Making the Cadastre and the Real Estate Registry work together is currently one of the most interesting challenges of the modernization processes of property rights systems.
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The problem is usually the same, even going beyond our Hispanic context. On the one hand, the idealism of believing that it is so easy, then the pessimism of the quaternary institutional structures. In the end, the person who loses is the citizen, who only wants their transaction to be carried out quickly and safely. The truth is that for this there is no magic recipe, because although it is a matter of common sense, practice shows us that this is the least common sense among those who participate in the chain of the process of a transaction.
Humans are short of memory after a button is failing, and it is a pity that the glory of success occupies poets rather than systematizers to be told with in style, without vainglory but as a simple culture of democratization of knowledge. Sure others have done it with fewer mistakes, but here I portray some basic aspects of how we did it in a Central American country, with some references to the 2014 Cadastre declarations, from which the ISO 19152 standard emerged.
1. THE APPROACH AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE SYSTEM IS VERTEBRAL.
The merit of the system is no longer strange, since we live in a time of technological advance and reengineering within the obvious. Of course we are not only talking aboutthe tool, but the complete environment that includes the business definition, the relatedstake holders, the legal backing, the modeling of technical methods, process execution, thesimplification of those related to territorial management and the life cycle of thetechnological tool.
In our case study, the flow was performed as follows, clarifying that they are not sequential but almost parallel steps, which were mostly performed over a period of two years:
A platform was developed that was ready for Registries, both Real Estate and Cadastre, seen as another registry. This is the Unified Registry System (SURE), which after 11 years continues to operate, after four government transitions –including a coup d’état-, qualified human resource rotation, arbitrary decisions and everything that countries on process of development are used to. It was piloted in a Registry Circumscription with an area of 160,000 plots, it currently operates in 16 of the 24 circumscriptions and the main reason it was not eliminated in a political whim was because it was the work tool of the users in Registry and Cadastre –since it was created- In the design of this System, in the first instance the Registration and Cadastre processes were developed, and recklessly those that could come in the new legislation.
The domain model for Cadastre was the Core Cadastre Domain Model CCDM, which in 2003 was barely an abstract after Cadastre 2014 which was literally a poem. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why the System won awards and a very favorable opinion at the FIG Workshop in Czechoslovakia.
Although the technological tool is the most visible when it comes to showing results, this involved an analysis and systematization of existing processes that have their own history. Complex, because the application of procedures differs from one registrar to another; also because when performing automation, what does not work on paper will not work in a mechanized system. And without demeriting, that in some contexts, it is preferable to be a dictator than a conciliator; some say that they were literally forced to make changes with a battery of changes not easy to digest.
It was also necessary to do a lot of legislative work in which it was easier to create a new law than to reform the existing one. The Registry depended on the Supreme Court of Justice, the Cadastre of a Secretariat of the Presidency and the National Geographic Institute of a Secretariat of Public Works. It was necessary to create new mechanisms for regularization, to give a simple example, expropriation in urban areas where there is a conflict of antecedents and where people are paying different owners. The law allowed expropriation on behalf of the state, in order to create a trust where people continued to pay, received their property title and the previous owners went to court to fight their issue. Once resolved, the trust money will belong to whoever won the judgment.
Although two years were not sufficient to do everything, when the new government arrived it was impossible to go back. The tools were mechanized so that it was almost impossible to get the job done without using the system.
2. THE CHANGE OF REGISTRATION TECHNIQUE PERSONAL FOLIO TO REAL FOLIO
On this there are whole books, confusions and perversions depending on who defends his position. In the case of study, the Real Folio technique already existed in law but was not applied as such, so the main decision was to gradually stop using Personal Folio.
As a general culture, the difference between the two techniques lies in the way of filing the documents that support property rights.
The Personal Folio Technique, maintains the index on the holders, not on the object, so the legal inscription identifier (asiento) obeys a transaction. Although it is highly questioned, the heritage that our parents inherited from our grandparents owes this technique the legal guarantee, not because it was the best, but because well applied by people accustomed to doing things in order, it worked very well following the logic steps of the presentation, annotation in the daily volume, marginalization, distribution control, confrontation and qualification. The difficulties occurred in the fact that to work on a presentation it was necessary to consult antecedents in other volumes, with which a high quantity of daily transactions made the response time extremely slow; not forgetting that the registry balance was impossible to control in cases that did not imply total individualization, the control of homonyms was crazy and cases such as nonindividualized urbanizations, pro-undivided and community of properties occupied a little more than Public Faith. It should also be clarified that the royal folio does not obey more modern processes; both misapplied techniques lead to equal errors. Again: if it doesn’t work on paper, it doesn’t work on the mechanized system, if it didn’t work on the old system, it almost certainly won’t work on the new one.
The Real Folio technique, by contrast, indexes the properties under registrations (matriculas) of unique identifier, in which liens, owners, improvements, adjoining, and other characteristics of the property are referred. This is done in an excerpted way, referring to folios, contrary to Personal Folio where the document was transcribed as it was and the tract is on the sidelines. In the ISO 19152 standard, the property is the Administrative Unit (BA_unit), being operated on Personal Folio or Rea Folio. Of course, a property in Real Folio is almost the equivalent of a cadastre parcel and the linking process will be facilitated.
3. THE STANDARDIZATION OF CADASTRE PROCESSES.
The modernization phase of the Cadastre was not necessarily pleasant, especially since a conflict was generated between the technicians of the old guard who had enough usable knowledge with the new ones who knew about technology but were unaware of many legal bases of the cadastre. Right or wrong, we specialized in mistakes and the profit was much higher.
One problem with Cadastre is that it expects to remain a specialized island that is easily outdated, as it is not integrated into the transactional process. Who would not want the cadastre tapestry to be respected for all sales, transfer, appraisal, use planning and procedures in the context of the new roles.
It was necessary to make changes and document, because to be honest many things were said by the ancient aliens but were not documented. Surely these are aspects surpassed by many countries, but I only report it to be honest in our case study, where the Cadastre is still a complex challenge. Among the aspects that I remember best:
The continuous topology survey, of the parcels and of the lands of public use like streets, rivers, lagoons, etc. The first ones were assigned a cadastral code with their respective cadastral file, to the public property also a cadastral code with its administrative folio. This is necessary, since the legal inscriptions records (asientos), as they are dismembered, require the complete existence of entrance areas and exit areas; as well as to control future invasions of registered public property.
Data separation by legislative specialization. The maps before the mThe maps before the modernization were true works of art, in them in addition to the plots were the sites of a legal nature, protected areas, points of geographical interest, risk zones, etc. These were separated into independent maps, making the parcel maps look quite simplistic, but seeking to facilitate the digitization and automation of topological processes.
This also generated some conflict, since the Cadastre was like the maker of everything. Although it was totally incapable of officializing its roles, in which responsible institutions already existed within its branches. Unifying the National Geographic Institute with the National Cadastre was not a wise move either, not because it cannot be done, but because the environment was not mature enough to take the IGN to a role as the regulatory body for cartography; in those days the concept of SDI was so abstract that it seemed to be taking away the power of the «great mapmaker«
The graphic is very particular for massive processes. It does not include the other end of the operation, however more or less it summarizes the logic of conformation of Royal Folio with its connection to the land parcels of Cadastre.
Once the Sheet-Map link was created, the Public View was expected, after which the field sheet was transferred to the cadastral sheet so that any modification was made via a cadastral maintenance request. This was left in the condition that it could be carried out at the request of the interested party, ex officio or at the request of registered users (surveyors or municipal technicians). Right now the process already has a trust established, with bases ready for the delegation to a private operator that will not only operate the Cadastre but also the Registry and the updating of the System.
The forensic chart, today adapted to LADM acronyms, shows how the processes had been formed under a systemic approach, so that the initial steps were only modeled , but could be automated under a continuous operation approach.
As you may have already noticed, I am being simplistic and brief due to the patience limitations of Internet readers. But many of the things we did were wrong. Ironic, but one of the aspects that was left out was the fiscal issue, thinking about such legislative separation, prioritizing too much over the legal one. Although the regulatory competence in tax matters remained in the hands of no one, we continued with the municipalities from their legislation, to avoid distorting the methods that the Cadastre had already modeled. Of course, this made the municipal systems build on their side their own cadastre modules that to this day have been difficult to reconcile.
The suffering for not including the fiscal still hurts in the economic aspect; basic principle of technological sustainability: If it doesn’t make money, it will die. Today, when it is being transferred to an Operator, the simple statistics of daily consultation show that it was able to start generating much more money long ago, but at least the conformation of demand was won. Linking Property Registry with Cadastre is the easiest step to make it sustainable ... of course, if it were easy. But it’s better than wanting to make it sustainable on its own.
4. LINKING THE LEGAL REGISTRY WITH THE CADASTRE PARCEL
Mechanized the processes like a factory, the Registry flow was quite simple: Scanning, cleaning and indexing of book, in order to obtain the digital book as a product, with the implicit tract in the mechanization and thus avoid the continued creation of books. Except for Powers / Judgments and other matters that continued to operate on the Personal Folio.
Extract from active legal inscriptions (asientos) and creation of registries (matriculas). With this, there was a kind of «digital folio or royal folio in formation», which itself is a royal folio (by the applied technique), but according to the particular aspirations of Honduran law, and the robustness of the system, a Real Folio must be linked to Cadastre.
On the Cadastre side, the massive field taking brought printed maps with photointerpreted delineation or total station files and field sheets to the cabinet. In the cabinet, it was digitized, linked and a geoparcel was created using mechanized tools at that time with VBA for Microstation Geographics. The graph shows a later step that was actually only an evolution of technology since in 2003 the space cartridge was not implemented, but the maps were linked by their centroid under the arc-node scheme, however the entire update process was transactional. Subsequently, migration to spatial database and desktop management was performed with Bentley Map. Currently in development a plugin for Qgis.
Once the elements BA_Unit (Registration in Royal Folio - Matricula) and Spatial_Unit existed, another factory process did the work of linking. It made a review from the cadastral sheet, where the Personal Folio reference had been raised, compared aspects of location, holders, area, background and other elements to create the link.
The following image shows the legal reality linked to physical reality. Although it is an example of an urbanized zone, the process is not so simple for various reasons. In the best of cases, it was possible to link up to 51% (Urban and Rural Average), the remaining link will be made by transactional demand and through the titling processes whose goal in this country is ... particular.
The Unified Registry System, once the link is created, shows the two realities, with alerts of possible irregularity. So a registration (matricula) without link to Cadastre only shows the great alert of «Not being georeferenced according to law«. Also the affectations that restrict the use, domain or occupation of the properties, although these two topics are a pending issue ... for another article, because institutional weakness is a topic that us technologists do not always understand.
For the linkage process, it was necessary - somewhat late I admit - to define automated alert criteria or a maintenance mechanism, so that the linkage was not prevented by 18 irregular aspects, among which were:
• Relationship one to many between parcels and registries (matriculas),
• Difference of rights for extra-registration transmission documents,
• Difference of areas due to apparent invasion of the public area,
• Differences due to mutation in the Registry or Cadastre after the cadastral sweep,
• Background not extracted,
• Horizontal property,
• Pro-undivided property,
• Difference of names of holders or duplication of holders,
• Etc., etc., etc.
For this, a widely used technique for the sustainability of technologies was applied: assign it to those who hurt the most. The user when seeing alerts, looks for how to solve them; total, is one of the principles of Registration: advertising.
5. THE CADASTRE AND REGISTRY DATA WILL NEVER BE THE SAME.
The step of linking for some time «politically attributable» was stopped and to date it is one of the complex challenges in the obligatory nature of the law, that every presentation must require linking to the Cadastral Registry. This aspect is somewhat complex, both for being too permissive but also for being as demanding as the Pope. Here are some guidelines, which are mostly processes to normalize.
The Cadastre and Registration area will never be the same.
For this, a tolerance formula was used, which considers the measurement method, the urban / rural condition based on its size, in this case the maximum scale used in previous surveys, as shown in the following image. As maximum tolerance it was considered 6% and as you can see, using a formula like this, the area decreases from 6% to 1% as the size of the property grows.
The formula was inserted as a stored procedure in the database, such that it is displayed dynamically in the system. If the documentary area is not within that range, then the system raises an alert for area difference.
A cadastral record is not the same as a topographic record.
If I am going to measure the property five times, its coordinates will be different each time (within a tolerance margin). This means that if its coordinates are within this range, it is not necessary to change the cadastral property; For this the LADM considers the measurement record, Survey_classes as a relationship between the Source_document and the Spatial_unit.
It is not possible to insist that those adjoining the notarial protocol must appear as names of persons; although the principle says that it must be explicit, we understand that this is when a map should be consulted, but if the map viewer is so clear that it does not occupy any specialty, then, the adjoining ones may be the cadastral keys. It sounds simple, but getting lawyers to understand takes time; what we hope will be resolved with the registration document.
It is not possible to start a process, without being regulated the certification of measurement professionals, measurement methods, tolerances, file presentation formats and coexistence procedures between the data collected with different precisions. If when measuring a property the need to remedy an entire area is evident, because it is poorly taken or due to the difference in method, for this the LADM considers the Point_parcel, with which the judgment of Armageddon can be avoided - which is currently looming -.
The legal benchmark is a referent, it is not infallible.
It was necessary to leave in the law, that the cadastral survey will be made based on the physical situation, and if in case there is a difference between the documentary area and the cadastral area, and the adjoining situation has not changed, nor is there evidence of claims , nor is it adjacent to public areas, the cadastral area will prevail. How easy it sounds, but enforcing that the existing deeds must be changed is another story; since by law I must recognize the registered right and I cannot declare irregular what I accepted under previous terms, just because my parameters changed.
It is necessary to define information filtering methods that facilitate the establishment of the regularity of the information. If a legal entity is Banco Davivienda, but in notarial protocols appears with different names for each branch, a consolidation procedure is required. Similarly, if a property was surveyed in different ways, but it is the same, it does not occupy a merging of properties but rather a consolidation. But both aspects must be legal.
The greatest challenges will always be human resources, in this sector, generally resistant to change and used to that things must be done only one way. There is no other option but to reinvent yourself and leave safeguards. Rotation for political purposes can even be profitable, although you have to be forewarned that it will be the greatest threat. To the extent that the legal basis can be used, outsourcing is a venial sin, as long.
6. At Last:
As I said at the beginning, the object of this article does not seek to launch magic recipes. Especially since the institutional reality in each country is extremely complex, not because of technical or legal aspects, but rather because of positions of power and lack of vision of its authorities. However, the example shows that it is possible to do interesting things in third world countries, if moments of glory are used to tie the irreversible aspects. Other countries have done it with less follies, others with better institutional conditions are fighting for real integration.
The text shows a passage from our religious literature, where there are terms that seem to be taken from an exchange of registry jurisprudence, with per diem paid to the past, in precious metal coins quantified in the balance - what a great idea for any official today-. No one doubted the certainty of the property or the value of the right registered in the «Open Transfer«. Of course, if we had wanted to link the cadastre and the registry on that date, we would have the same problems, and the same consulting work for herbal smokers as us.
Property registration is based on common sense. Property right transactions have existed since man discovered agriculture, and realized that he could create human settlements.
In the case of Honduras, currently in view of the new version of the System, the modeled processes are almost as important as the aspects not reached, because the business is the same, the environment will mutate in the least, the processes will change. In the world of technological innovation that we live in, between the time I started writing the article and the date that you happened to read it, there is a new technology boom offering to solve the Registry- Cadastre problem, and three new consultants offering their services. We must remember that technologies are only an input; the balance between the pressure between the technological supply and the demand for modernization is the standard.
