Questions over $145m Landonline database

By ADAM GIFFORD

Stage one of the $145 million Landonline electronic land registry system is complete now Auckland is fully connected, but debate continues over how much has improved for its users.

Despite the amount of taxpayer money spent on it over the past six years, there is little for the public in Landonline.



Only conveyancing solicitors and surveyors were considered likely customers when it was being developed, and they must pay $500 to get access to titles and more than $1000 to see survey plans online.

A "Skylight" service the public can use to order land title information seems deliberately unhelpful and lacks basic search features which would make it useful.

Landonline manager Lindsay Meehan said the average turnaround time was within the 20 working days allowed for title transactions and 13 or 26 days for survey transactions, depending on whether the surveyor was accredited.

The acceptable times were longer than under the paper-based system so staff could get familiar with the computerised systems.

Land Information New Zealand also shed staff by closing regional offices, meaning fewer people are left to do the work.

"Part of the business case for Landonline was that we would achieve savings by reducing staff numbers," Meehan said.

"If you look nationally we have 27,000 documents pending and we are processing 17,000 a week, so we have less than a two-week backlog."

Major users of the system claim the turnaround time for documents is closer to 30 days than 20.

Barry Green, a technical consultant with national land transfer agent Landinfonet, said the time taken to turn around titles at the Auckland office was now more than 30 days, compared with 12 to 15 days before the electronic system was introduced.

And, he said, while a lot of effort was being put into getting titles into the system, there was no process for immediate correction of mistakes.

Green's concerns are echoed by Wellington search agent Neil Grant, who said problems with mistakes made by Land Information staff entering data into Landonline could go unfixed for months, despite constant phone calls and emails.

"We have 100 corrections in their office, some up to four months old, and our clients are screaming," Grant said.

"It is basic stuff like names spelled wrongly, the name of the vendor, rather than the purchaser, being put on the new title, failure to show a mortgage has been discharged."

He said that when the mistake was the fault of the solicitor or agent, Linz seemed to sit on the paperwork.

"Often it is taking four weeks from when they reject it to when it hits our desk again," Grant said.

Meehan said he could not comment on specific cases, but "that is not the norm".

Grant and Green said Landonline enabled documents to be processed by any Linz office, but that was causing problems because of different interpretations of the rules.



Tim Jones, the Law Society representative on the Landonline user group, said standards were coming into line.



Many of the problems that had emerged had more to do with staff quality and training than the Landonline system.

"Linz needs to ensure its people are as intelligent as possible," Jones said.

The Wellington office seemed to have particular problems.

"I suspect a lot of old school people there are not prepared to get into the modern era."

Jones said lawyers were becoming familiar with the online search process, but were still pressing for changes in the way the screens were configured.

"The searching facility was not developed by a lawyer or a search clerk. We are gradually getting them to modify it to simplify it," Jones said.

Meehan said contractor PricewaterhouseCoopers was now testing phase two of Landonline, which would enable conveyancers and surveyors to enter data directly into the system.