If the proposed increase in Land Registry charges goes ahead on May 1st next, it will have a significant impact on property owners. House buyers registering property transfers will be most affected. They formerly paid a maximum fee of £250 for any property worth over £30,000. From May 1st, however, they will be expected to pay anything between £300 and £500 depending on the purchase price of the home.
The breakdown of these new costs is made up of an introduction of a standard fee of £100 for mortgage, in addition to the fee on transfer. If a second mortgage is later required, this standard fee of £100 is also applicable. From May onwards, it will cost purchasers £300 to register property transfers worth between £40,000 and £200,000. The fee for properties between £200,000 and £300,000 will be £400. And it will cost £500 for properties worth over £300,000.
For any property worth in excess of £200,000, purchasers therefore will be paying nearly double the fees. What was formerly a maximum fee of £250 will increase to a maximum of £500. The most significant difference is that the property owner now has to pay per item, rather than for a number of items bunched together with a ceiling fee of £250.
Other widely used Land Registry services, such as voluntary transfer and transmission of property on death, will increase from £40 to £70. The commonly used service of a certified copy folio with map will also increase from £9 to £20.
In the case of transfer of part of a property - for example, when a builder is selling one of his houses to a new house owner - a transfer of one house will cost £50 to register. First time registration of a property will cost £70.
Queries withdrawn, abandoned or refused will cost between £20 and £50. According to the Land Registry, it deals with about 2,000 of these queries a year.
THE director general of the Law Society, Ken Murphy, has been highly critical of the increases. He claims that they're not justified and that due to the registry's backlog of more than 80,000 cases, house buyers are experiencing a delay of up to 18 months from the receipt of their property to actual registration. There have even been cases, he claimed, of house owners who are on their second mortgage, who find that the first one hasn't yet been registered.
The Land Registry, however, claims that the increase in fees reflects to a greater extent the cost of providing its services.
An increase in fees in the Registry of Deeds was also put into place, on February 1st last. Queries made by the registry to the purchaser's solicitor - which forms a large part of the registry's work - costs an additional £10. There has been no review of Land Registry fees since 1991. The then Minister for Justice, Ray Burke, brought the last fees order into effect.
More than 400 people work in the Dublin-based Land Registry office. Due to the increase of activity in the property market and the subsequent increase in workload, it has reduced to one hour a day the time it accepts telephone calls from the public. Last year alone, it handled 133,207 dealings. It received a total of 358,821 of all categories of cases.
There are already at least 150 staff working in the Land Registry's Waterford office which deals with mainly Munster-related queries, but also includes counties Offaly, Wexford, Laois and Carlow. The Minister for Justice has yet to confirm whether the entire Land Registry office will be decentralised to Waterford.
