LAND REGISTRY AND CADASTRE

In Spain there are two real estate registries: one is the Cadastre and the other is the Land Registry. Their raison d'être is the need to accredit the characteristics of real estate.

The Land Registry is a public service whose purpose is the registration or annotation of acts, contracts and judicial or administrative resolutions affecting property and other rights over real estate, as well as certain judicial resolutions affecting the capacity of persons. Its purpose is to provide security in the real estate market, since it includes all the relevant information about the property: description, owner and encumbrances that weigh on them. The inscription in the Registry is not obligatory, but it is, without a doubt, very advisable.

The Real Estate Cadastre is an administrative registry under the Ministry of Finance in which rustic, urban and special characteristics real estate is described. Its regulation is based on the Texto Refundido de la Ley del Catastro Inmobiliario (Revised Text of the Real Estate Cadastre Law). An important difference with the Land Registry is that registration is compulsory and free of charge. According to Article 3 of this Law, "the cadastral description of real estate will include its physical, economic and legal characteristics". Its main purpose is to serve as a basis for the application of taxes such as IBI, Inheritance and Gift Tax or Transfer Tax.

It is frequent that the data that each one of them have do not coincide. This happens more frequently in farms or buildings that already have a certain age, since the description or the data that are collected are transcribed "according to the manifestation of the interested parties", which has been transferred several times from deed to deed without having verified the physical reality of the farm or building. Discrepancies usually occur in matters such as surface area, volume, boundaries of the property, and even in the location data of the same.

It must be taken into account that in order to be able to correctly register a property in the Registry, the norm allows the existence of small errors in the surface in relation to the Cadastre. If the error exceeds this surface, the Registry could paralyze the inscription until the situation is clarified.

The existence of differences between the data held by each of the registries can generate problems for the owners, especially when there is a desire to put a property up for sale.

It is important to know that while the discrepancy exists, the prevailing entity is the Land Registry, since the cadastre is nothing more than an administrative registry of all real estate in Spain whose purpose is to serve as a basis for the application of taxes to such properties, while the Land Registry is a public registry that legally guarantees the ownership of a given property.

The Mortgage Law enables different ways to solve the discrepancies between the Cadastre, the Land Registry and the physical reality of the properties. In URBINA LEGAL we help you and manage the different ways to solve the discrepancies:

• The registration of the georeferenced graphic representation of the property and its coordination with the Cadastre.
• The registry demarcation of the property.

• Rectification of your description.
• The registration of plantations, buildings, installations and other improvements incorporated to the farm.
• The immatriculation of properties that are not registered in favor of any person.
• The file of resumption of the interrupted successive tract.
• The procedure for the correction of double or multiple immatriculation.
• The record of release of charges or encumbrances extinguished by prescription, expiration or non-use.