Ownership details at touch of a button

All transactions involving the sale of land and other property in the State are being computerised, making vital information on property ownership accessible to banks, solicitors and potential purchasers at the touch of a button.

The Land Registry records of six counties including Dublin, Galway, Mayo, Sligo, Clare and Roscommon, have already been included in a huge data base and the task of computerising records from all other counties is now under way.

The development will speed up considerably the time it takes to inspect deeds and titles.

The new information system, entitled Integrated Title Registration Information System (ITRIS), will be launched tonight by the

Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr O'Donoghue. Its implementation has taken place against a background of unprecedented growth in the property market which has resulted in substantial increases in the workload of the Land Registry in recent years.

The Land Registry holds records for about 1.5 million individual properties and as Ms Catherine Treacy, the chief executive/Registrar of Deeds and Titles explained, keeping track of this national resource and all of the legal transactions affecting it has been a major challenge, particularly as the buoyancy of the property market increases the demand for the registry's services.

The number of applications handled by the registry has increased dramatically in recent years. They have grown from 228,000 in 1991 to a projected figure of 375,000 for 1999. During this period, the number of applications for registration alone - new ownerships - has grown from 86,000 to a projected 130,000 for the current year.

Th new system will allow solicitors and others to inspect folios from the comfort of their own offices. Folios give details of who owns a property, what exactly they own, if there is a mortgage on the property or any legal cases pending involving it.

A Web site has been set up to allow people access to this information. Access to the site is on a subscription basis with inspections costing £1 each and copies of file plans costing £9.

"Quite often a folio for a particular property is wanted at the same time by a number of different people if a property is for sale. The beauty of this system is that any number of people can access the information at the same time," Ms Treacy said.

Apart from substantially reducing the time it takes to process cases, it will also reduce the amount of time staff spend on frustrating tasks such as searching for missing folios, she added.

Implementation of the system to date has cost £1 million and it will cost a further £2 million to complete the project.

The software services company, EDS Ireland of Lower Grand Canal Street, Dublin, which built the system, designed it to facilitate the computerisation of Land Registry maps at a future date.

Computerisation of these maps and the completion of the programme to convert paper folios into electronic format could take several years.