Certainty of title in cross-border real estate transactions in EUrope : a goal for the public sector or an opportunity for the private sector?
Ploeger, Hendrik & Bastiaan van Loenen
In 2007 the European Commission published the White Paper on the Integration of EU Mortgage Credit Markets (COM (2007) 807 final). In this document the Commission proposes measures to reach a competitive and efficient cross border mortgage credit market. The issue of efficiency of land registration procedures proved to be an important point, and the Commission considers that improvements in this field should be made. The White Paper announces recommendations to the Member States to ensure that their land registers are available online, to adhere to the EULIS project and to introduce more transparency and reliability into their land registers. This is a minimalist approach, and the recommendations will not resolve the problems of the diversity of the national systems of land registry, with different levels of legal certainty. In this paper we will propose a more comprehensive approach. The required transparency and certainty may be achieved through a common way of land registration in Europe. The EuroTitle concept offers such a model. We discuss whether the development of a common standard should be left to the private sector (by the concept of title insurance) or the public sector (the land registries). In this analysis, we will take into account the situation in the US where similar issues have been dealt with by the title industry.
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