In Spain real estate (land, buildings, housing, premises), are usually registered in two different registers, the Land Registry and the Cadastre.
The Land Registry is a public service organized in public offices in towns and cities, whose purpose is to provide security in the real estate market, since it includes all the relevant information about the farm: description, owner and loads that weigh on they. Registration in the Land Registry is not mandatory.
On the contrary, the Cadastre is an administrative register, dependent on the Ministry of Finance in which real estate is described. The cadastral description includes its physical, legal and economic characteristics, among which are its location, cadastral reference, area, use, cultivation, graphic representation, cadastral value and cadastral titleholder. Its purpose is basically to provide the tax administration with the necessary information for the purpose of collecting local taxes; For this reason, the registration of the properties in the Cadastre is mandatory.
It is common for both records to present discrepancies in relation to the same farm, in terms of location, boundaries, surface, volume, owner, etc.
These discrepancies generate legal uncertainty that may be the cause of loss of sales opportunities, or delays in the signing of operations that imply a price reduction.
In order to avoid the problems that these differences usually generate, when identifying and defining the property perfectly, Law 13/2015 was enacted to reform the Mortgage Law, whose objective is to achieve full legal security through the harmonization of the Land Registry and Cadastre, so that the information offered by both institutions is consistent.
This law obliges property owners to register farms or perform land reorganization operations (grouping, segregation, grouping, urban planning), to coordinate the identification of the properties in the Cadastre and the Land Registry.
On the other hand, the owner of the property can also voluntarily call for coordination, with the aim of re-establishing the agreement of data between both registers and thus achieve the perfect identification of the property. There are several mechanisms for this, depending on the discrepancy, among others:
- The registration of the georeferenced graphic representation of the farm and its coordination with the Cadastre.
- The registry demarcation of the farm.
- The rectification of its description.
- Registration of plantations, buildings, facilities and other improvements incorporated into the farm.
- The file of resumption of the successive tract interrupted.
- The procedure of rectification of double or multiple registration.
- The record of release of charges or charges extinguished by prescription, expiration or non-use.
Adopting this prevention even though there is no imminent intention to transmit the farm, will generate greater legal certainty which, in turn, will allow greater agility in a future eventual transmission.