Effective December 1, 2004, a new land registry system was rolled out in HRM which is electronically based. Traditionally in Nova Scotia if you were going to purchase a property or re-mortgage, your lawyer’s role would be to certify to you, and your bank, that once you bought the property you would have good marketable title. This means that anyone who had an interest in the property would have released that interest, that there are no liens against the property and no outstanding mortgages. The lawyer would also certify the specific nature of the property to you, such as explain any easements or burdens and have you review any restrictive covenants that might run with the land and would affect how you could use the land.
To do this a lawyer would have to search back through the old deeds and documents which are stored at the Registry of Deeds for at least 40 years. If I looked back 40 years and there was no deed because the property had passed for a few generations by possession, for example, I would have to keep looking until I found a deed. Every time the property passed hands if a new lawyer was retained they would have to do the same search again, because we cannot rely on each other’s work. You can imagine the waste of time and money for the consumer.
Prior to the Land Registration Act coming into force, the Nova Scotia government mapped every parcel in the province and assigned a parcel identification number (PID) to each parcel. To migrate your property into the land registry system your lawyer will do that same historical title search one last time and then create a summary of the specific nature of your parcel and it will be attached to your PID number. We call this the parcel register. Your lawyer certifies this to the Nova Scotia government, who in turn certifies it to the public.
Then a curtain is drawn, so to speak, from that point on, so any searches in the future would only go back to the date that the property is migrated, not 40 years. Also from that point forward, every document pertaining to your property is electronically submitted to the Land Registry Office and the parcel register is updated automatically. So as a purchaser, your lawyer can look, anytime, via their computer to see if there is a mortgage against a property you are interested in purchasing or if there are easements over the property, for example. This should mean less cost for future transactions.
However, you do have to pay legal fees to have your property migrated into the new system. The legal fees alone, not including the costs of a title search, if applicable, will likely range between $500 and $1200, and could be more, depending on the work that needs to be done before your lawyer can certify title to the government. Right now there are two main triggers that will result in having to have your property migrated; selling your property, or borrowing money against your property. If you are thinking about selling or borrowing money against your property, contact us today so we can ensure your property is migrated to the new system so it’s ready when you are.