The Government of Nova Scotia has enacted new legislation and acquired new technology to modernize our 250-year-old Registry of Deeds system. The Land Registration Act moves Nova Scotia from an antiquated, names-based system to a system that guarantees ownership and provides access to land-related information for subscribers through an Internet browser.
The new system guarantees land ownership. The registered owner is, by law, conclusively the owner of the parcel. At present, ownership can only be determined after a review of all relevant title documents deposited at the Registry of Deeds, which entails a review or title search of the property. Lawyers then give their opinion as to who owns and has legal rights to the property.
With the new land registration system, once all the required steps and procedures have been completed and the property is converted to the new system, there is no need to do an historic review of title - a person wishing to know who owns a parcel of land simply has to look for the registered owner of the land. This eliminates the wasteful, expensive, and repetitive need to search the historic title to land each time it is transferred or mortgaged.
Under the new system, each parcel of land is given a parcel identification number (PID) and all information is indexed according to the PID instead of by the owner's name. Tying ownership and interests in land to a particular parcel makes searching simpler and less prone to confusion and error.
Conversion to the new land registration system will not be necessary unless a land owner is selling or mortgaging property, or subdividing it into three or more lots for the purpose of selling those lots. When land is sold, the seller may, as a condition of the sale, require the buyer to pay the fees for preparing the necessary paperwork and transferring the property into the new system.
The owner will need the help of a lawyer to transfer a parcel to the new system which is a two step process.
The lawyer will firstly review the historic title records by conducting a title search, certify title, and file a new legal description for the property being converted or migrated, this is termed a Parcel Description Certification Application (PDCA).
A PDCA is the new legal description that owners of property will use to match the property description written in a deed with the electronic picture of the parcel on the provincial map. This must be done before any parcel can be converted from the old registry system to the new system.
In order to convert parcels of land into the new land registration system, each land parcel is identified by a unique Parcel Identification Number referred to as a "PID". The use of unique PIDs will eliminate the confusion in our current registry system where land ownership records are listed by the names of the owners, not by the location of the parcels.
Once the PID and the PDCA have been compared then the legal description to the property is then certified and the second step of the conversion process can be commenced. This second step is referred to as the Application for Registration, "AFR" which triggers the conversion of the parcel to the new system.
In the AFR process the all interests that have an effect on the property being converted are entered into the electronic record, which not only gives property owners guaranteed ownership of their land, it makes it easier for them to finance or sell their property. Once transferred the old traditional and historic search of the title in order to mortgage or transfer land will never be necessary as ownership of the parcel of land is guaranteed by the government to be the owner of the parcel.
To proceed to migrate your property, please contact me.