Thousands of property owners have had years of problems solved and transfers unblocked with the passage of the Department of Digital Government bill to complete the Land Registry. Henceforth, owners will be able to unilaterally amend the contracts in their favor, correcting the square footage and other elements of their property, without requiring the cooperation of other owners, as was the case until now in apartment buildings, which blocked the transfers as well, for example, in a 40-apartment block of flats, 39 owners had to sign to sell an apartment, in case the engineer’s measurement did not agree with what was stated in the contract, as was the case in most properties of earlier decades.

At the same time, a procedure is being established for the immediate return of outstanding mortgage fees to their beneficiaries, and thousands of cases are being resolved with the possibility of obtaining title to property based on a preliminary contract.

However, these are not the only chronic problems resolved by the new law: typical is the issue corrected by Article 15 of the bill, entitled “Correction of cadastral registration in case of a decision to accept objections against the forest map”. With this, if an owner who has appealed against the Forest Service for his property is vindicated in an objection committee, he will be able within two months of the decision to appeal to the cadastral office whose head is obliged to return his property to him.

For some time now, moreover, the issue of manifest errors has been effectively settled, as more than 400,000 properties that were wrongly calculated in the forest maps had to prove through court decisions that the forestry services that justified them were telling… the truth.

The unfortunate property owners, for whose properties registered in the Land Registry the Greek State claimed that they were within a forest map, and therefore forest land, without this actually being the case, had to go through a calvary of procedures. That is to appeal to the Forest Map Objections Committee and receive a decision confirming that their property is not in a forest area. Then, they would have to make a new appeal, this time to the Court of Justice, with the decision of the Forest Maps Commission in their hands and receive a court decision that would confirm what was true from the beginning, that is, that their property is not located in a forest area.

This “blockage” of thousands of properties that were essentially delaying the cadastral registration has been corrected by the new regulation of the Ministry of Digital Governance, which changes the process. Today, owners will be able to take the decision of the Forest Map Commission and without a court decision submit it to their cadastral office, either electronically or in person, proceeding with the registration of the (previously disputed) property in the Cadastre.

Monopartial correction of data

But there are other provisions that solve issues that block the cadastre, such as that of electronic building identification, which was stopped if there were even small discrepancies with the original measurement.

Article 16, entitled “Possibility of unilateral correction of contract data – Conditions and permissible deviations of floor area measurements”, resolves the issues of properties in horizontal properties that need urban planning adjustments. There are hundreds of thousands of apartments – mainly in blocks of flats with semi-public spaces, common area uses, etc. – for which an attempt was made to obtain an electronic identity card, but this proved impossible as there were ‘details’ that needed to be sorted out.

Until recently, to make it possible to issue an electronic ID card, which is necessary for registration in the Land Registry, owners had to correct the difference in the centimeters of the apartment in the horizontal property. The “detail” was that to pass this correction they had to have the written consent of the other owners. That is, if it did not turn out that the variation in the area of the property was due to the annexation of part of the common area, the deed of amendment of the horizontal property recommendation had to be signed by all the co-owners (1,000/1,000) of the building, which is impossible in practice, especially if it concerns old apartment buildings with many owners. With the tenants of… half of the country’s apartment buildings having disputes over utilities and other issues, the process was stuck because of the reluctance (or reasonable hesitation) of other owners to consent.

This has changed, as now the owners of the above properties will be able to unilaterally correct the centimeters of the apartment and settle their property without the consent of other co-owners, through electronic means, by quickly and easily taking out an electronic ID card. The signatures of the other occupants will not be necessary, provided that the adjacent properties are not affected and that the planning violation has been committed before it came into their ownership. That is, the owners must have so purchased the property.

Thus, they unblock thousands of frozen transactions (parental transfers, donations, transfers etc.) which until now could not be completed without first amending the deeds. Now, owners will be able to unilaterally amend them without the consent of the other owners of the building in question if the above conditions are met.

Body modifications

Another part that is changing is the part concerning spatial changes. Now, in the system that has been created, the engineers of the Hellenic Cadastre have a dominant role, while in areas where there is a large workload (due to the volume of spatial changes), the pool of the register of certified engineers is used. The latter can issue decisions, relieving the volume, while the process will be done digitally and the register will be active so that citizens can automatically pass a spatial change for which they have the consent of neighbors and do not have to appeal to a certified engineer who will issue a decision.

Artificial Intelligence

Shortly after midnight, a citizen submits a deed for their property to the Land Registry. Within a few minutes, the digital employee at the Land Registry, using Artificial Intelligence, reads the contract, identifies the deed to be done, identifies what is still needed, checks the completeness of the data and makes a recommendation to the supervisor to approve or reject the details of the contract.

This is not a scene from a science fiction movie, but the tangible reality of the implementation, for the first time in the Greek public sector, of Artificial Intelligence in the Land Registry. It is one of the many innovations implemented to reduce, if not eliminate, the bureaucracy that has been plaguing citizens, to complete the cadastre by the beginning of 2025, and to make the Cadastre a useful tool in the hands of all Greeks…

The start of final act leading to the completion of the Cadastre was given with the passing of the bill of the Ministry of Digital Governance on “Completion of cadastral registration, simplification of procedures, use of Artificial Intelligence and provisions for the operation of the NCDD “Hellenic Cadastre””.
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This advances a series of interventions, which essentially puts the Cadastre on track for completion. These, as formulated in the text of the bill, provide, apart from the use of AI in the control of contracts, the completion of cadastral registration by 2025, the acceleration and digitalization of the process of correction of spatial changes, the extrajudicial solution for properties declassified as forest and returned to their owners, without hassle and the correction of properties of unknown owner, in favor of the real owner.

The arbitrary and “unknown owner”

The last deadline and no deadline extension is November 30 for properties that are designated “unknown owner”. These are more than 160,000 properties in 313 areas of the country that either come from inheritances for which no deeds of acceptance of ownership have been drawn up, usufructuary properties and contested properties in which there are obvious errors or have no cadastral records even though they should have been declared by 2018.

Under the new regulation, the Public Sector is waived from pursuing legal remedies for properties that appear in the initial registrations as “unknown owner” if there is a final court decision have individuals have been recognized as owners of the properties. The registration process in the Land Registry can be done or corrected very quickly now, as long as public documents (such as title deeds) prove that the ownership of a property does not affect another owner’s right and that the property has not also been registered by another person.

Otherwise, the owners risk either to lose the property, which will be definitively declared as “unknown owner” and will pass into the ownership of the Greek State, or to pay fines for late declaration to the Land Registry, as well as not being able to proceed with any action (transfer, sale, building permit).

YES and 24-hour submission of documents

Completing a process involving the Land Registry was until recently synonymous with torture. Who can forget the huge queues, with anxious citizens queuing outside the offices literally from the early hours of the morning, getting priority paperwork and waiting not for hours, but for days, for their work to be processed? These images are now a thing of the past, as AI is being introduced in the legal control of the Land Registry, making the decision-making processes much faster, much more relaxing, and much less costly.

This is because in order to approve or reject a contract, the head of each department had to read it carefully. With contracts running up to 200 pages, supervisors had to identify the necessary elements and apply the rules of legal control, manually identifying whether all conditions were met (e.g., ENFIA). This process, not taking into account the fatigue of each supervisor, took from half an hour to more than two hours.

Now, the Land Registry has piloted a new AI tool for supervisors across the country. This tool, which cost the government nothing as it was created by the Ministry of Digital Government, is based on the use of Microsoft Azure Open AI technology. Given that the high technological quality and reliability of the tool is ensured by the fact that the development and hosting of the system was supported by Microsoft, its main weapon is that it does not require staff training, as it is very simple to use.

The Land Registry’s AI system, then, can read the text of a contract in natural language, skimming, for example, 200 pages in a matter of minutes, and identify the type of deed by identifying the elements required under legal rules and applying an automatic completeness check on the elements of a contract, such as updates and declaration ENFIA.

After that, the AI system generates an automatic recommendation to the supervisor to approve or reject elements of the contract. Tests have shown that as the supervisor only needs to make a decision based on the AI tool’s informed recommendation, the process is now completed in less than 10 minutes, up from two hours previously. In addition, the cost to the Greek State is also dramatically reduced, as the procedure will cost as little as €0.30 instead of the €15 it used to cost!

As the Minister of Digital Governance, Dimitris Papastergiou, has pointed out, this AI capability makes the everyday life of citizens and businesses simpler, with AI not making decisions, but significantly assisting the officials involved, speeding up processes. “We aim for faster legal control while improving legal certainty.

The Cadastre has not only moved into its completion stage solving a decades-old problem, but by leveraging emerging technologies it is becoming a public sector exemplar. An example of how we can use the introduction of AI to free up significant strengths and resources of the Public Administration.”

The benefits of introducing AI are multiple – and not just the above. Firstly, it enables transactions to be submitted 24 hours a day, as it is not necessary for the department to be open or for someone to be in the office for the AI application to work. The bureaucracy is reduced while facilitating and securing transactions, as the purchase and sale of real estate is completed faster and more securely.