- March 2006
Issue 20 - February 2006
Issue 19 - November/ December 2005
Issue 18 - October 2005
Issue 17 - September 2005
Issue 16 - August 2005
Issue 15 - July 2005
Issue 14 - June 2005
Issue 13 - May 2005
Issue 12 - April 2005
Issue 11 - March 2005
Issue 10 - February 2005
Issue 9 - December 2004
Issue 8 - Hot Topics
Special Issue - November 2004
Issue 7 - October 2004
Issue 6 - September 2004
Issue 5 - August 2004
Issue 4 - July 2004
Issue 3 - June 2004
Issue 2 - May 2004
Issue 1
IN THIS ISSUE
- LINZ News
- In brief
- March figures
- Extended hours
- Landonline 2.7 Full Release
- Screen Resolution
- Landwrap - special edition
- In brief
- 100% e-lodgement
- Landonline
- e-survey
- e-dealing
- Regulatory
- Landwrap
LINZ News
In brief
-
March figures for electronic lodgements:
- A total of 447 out of 1265 possible law firms lodged an e-dealing in March (an increase of 52 from February). Twenty law firms were first time e-dealers in March.
- The e-dealing share of the total e-dealing capable lodgements sat at 22.6% in March. There has been a 70% increase in e-dealing instruments lodged in the past 6 months.
- A total of 128 survey firms out of a possible 320 lodged an e-survey in March (11 more than the previous month). Four survey firms were first time e-survey lodgers in March.
- The e-survey share of the total survey lodgements was 42.6% for March (up 1.1 percentage points from February). More than 50% of Cadastral Survey Datasets are being lodged electronically by eight out of twelve land districts.
- Extended Hours: Landonline is now available over extended hours. The new hours, excluding public holidays and weekends involving new Landonline releases, are:
Monday to Thursday: 7am – 9pm Friday: 7am – 7pm Saturday: 9am to 5pm
During these hours Landonline customers are able to undertake a search and create, prepare, certify, sign and release an e-dealing. Survey customers can prepare and submit an e-survey. However, the hours for submitting e-dealings or paper documents remain the same, i.e. 9am to 4pm Monday to Friday on normal working days.
Note: Landonline will not be available on Saturday 13 May 2006 as this is when the 2.7 Full Release is being implemented.
- Landonline 2.7 Full Release: The latest six-monthly upgrade to Landonline is scheduled for 15 May 2006. Closer to this time, detailed release notes will be available, affected quick reference cards and user guides will be updated, and a special edition of Landwrap will be published focussing on the changes you will see when using the new version. This special edition will contain the detail of the Landonline 2.7 Full Release as referred to in Landwrap 20 (March 06).
Note: The implementation of the Landonline 2.7 Full Release means Landonline will not be available on Saturday 13 May 2006.
- Screen Resolution: With the added functionality of Landonline, it has become more and more necessary to make use of all the space available on screen. This means that to avoid missing important tick boxes and other buttons, it is essential that your screen resolution is set at 1024 x 768. If you currently have your screen set to another resolution, you can change it by going into Settings, then Control Panel and choosing the Display Options icon. From there, click on the Settings tab and adjust your screen resolution accordingly.
- Landwrap: Next month, Landwrap will break from its normal publication cycle. Landwrap 22 will focus on the Landonline 2.7 full release in mid May, while Landwrap 23 will focus on the changes to the Landonline website due at the beginning of June.
100% e-lodgement
100% e-lodgement - Topical Questions
By now, many Landwrap readers will be familiar with the main points of 100% e-lodgement. By 1 July 2008, all land title transactions and survey plans will be lodged electronically.
The full benefits of an electronic lodgement system cannot be realised while it is run in tandem with paper-based transactions. Moving to 100% electronic lodgement via Landonline will lead to:
- a higher quality of service for New Zealanders buying, selling, and sub-dividing property
- streamlined electronic work processes in title and survey preparation and lodgement, and
- efficiencies through faster processing.
The withdrawal of paper-based lodgements, and move to 100% electronic lodgement via Landonline, will be phased in gradually as follows:
| Discharges | 1 May 2007 |
| All Transfer & Mortgage types currently e-dealing capable | 1 August 2007 |
| Survey lodgements | 1 September 2007 |
| All remaining Title transactions | 1 July 2008 |
Topical questions: Titles
From a titles point of view, questions we've received from customers relate to processing. There are a number of instruments that currently can not be lodged electronically – what will happen with them? Will this change how dealings will need to be prepared? How long is the processing of electronically lodged instruments going to take?
During the phase-in period for 100% electronic lodgement, LINZ will enhance Landonline e-dealing functionality to bring the remaining titles transaction types online, enabling all titles transactions to be lodged electronically and more instrument types to be automatically registrable (e.g., multiple Transfers and Mortgages). For further details on how different intstruments will be lodged, refer to the 100% electronic lodgement section of the Landonline website.
A number of instruments will be treated as a "Lodged e-dealing". This is where they are lodged using a supporting template (e.g. complex easements) or in some cases instruments will be lodged with a scanned attachment. A LINZ staff member will check the dealing after the request has been lodged electronically.
The preparation of these dealings will be similar to what you do now, except that you are likely (in most cases) to complete a new Create Dealing screen and use a template, saving time for LINZ staff to input data into Landonline.
LINZ is carefully considering the impact of processing times in our design, particularly for the larger new title dealings, and where possible we will streamline processes e.g. in some cases auto-population of information for the instruments will be possible.
Topical questions: Survey
There are several Survey questions that customers have asked, in various forms. These are:
Q: How robust is the Landonline system? Does it have the capacity for 100% e-surveys?
A: LINZ is doing everything possible to ensure that the Landonline system is robust, and there are no issues with capacity, internet activity, network connections, or servers. LINZ is committed to keeping up with technology. For further information, refer to the Protecting Your Data story in this Landwrap, and also Landwrap 19.
Q: Is LINZ guaranteeing commitment to attend to professional queries by phone as previously done?
A: Yes. Processing centre staff will still be available to answer your questions, and there will be more customer support staff manning the 0800 number to ensure your calls are resolved quickly.
Q: Fees – will they change?
A: Yes, the fees will increase in line with demand for improved functionality and reliability, but they will still be cheaper when compared with what the fees for paper plans and documents would be if we were to keep that system. Stakeholders such as NZIS and NZLS will be consulted in the fee setting process.
Where to find more information
The Landonline website has a dedicated area detailing 100% e-lodgement. It contains general information, FAQs and sections specifically targeted to providing detailed information for Conveyancing professionals, Surveyors, Territorial Authorities and Landonline Search customers.
Landonline
Protecting your data in Landonline
In the feedback customers have given LINZ regarding the move to 100% e-lodgement, many of you want to know what LINZ is doing to protect your data within Landonline. Specifically, you want to know what we are doing to make sure any transactions you perform in the system are recoverable, even if the system goes down.
Landwrap 19 describes LINZ's Disaster Recovery plan in detail. In this article, we describe the measures LINZ has in place are designed to protect or resurrect any data against such an event.
These measures include:
- Audit Logs
- Daily Back Up tapes
- User Activity Logging (UAL)
- Database Recovery (DBR) (currently being investigated)
Audit Logs
If processing stops and data is lost from Landonline, EDS (Electronic Data Systems Corporation) attempts to restore the data to the point that processing ceased. Audit logs are not a duplication of Landonline data, but rather record all the processing that has occurred within Landonline. If data is lost, it can be regenerated from the Audit logs up to a given point in time.
Back Up tapes
The entire Landonline database is backed up overnight onto tapes. In the event of an incident causing data loss, EDS will first attempt to restore it from the Audit logs. If this is not possible, EDS will restore Landonline from the previous day's backup tapes. That means that if the loss occurs at the beginning of the day, there won't be any loss of data, but if it occurs at noon, there will be several hours' worth of lost data. This lost data can be re-entered through the use of User Activity Logs.
User Activity Logs (UAL)
The UAL is a log of all significant activities, i.e. the important steps that are completed in the processing of all transactions and maintenance functions. UAL information is continuously passed from Landonline in real time to a separate database for emergency use – so a current record (to the second) is always available. So if, for example, EDS is unable to restore data for a period of 20 minutes, all internal and external processing for that 20 minutes would be recreated using data from the UAL file, to trigger recreation by manual processing.
LINZ has developed and tested detailed processes, procedures and software to deal with a UAL event. These include:
- A process to protect the priority of any dealings affected by data loss (by automatically creating Departmental Dealings against affected titles).
- A reporting tool that can send reports of specific data loss to customers to allow the recreation of lost data.
- A detailed communications plan to cover potential data loss scenarios, designed to keep customers informed throughout such an event.
Database Recovery (DBR)
Landonline has systems in place to help ensure that data is not lost, and if it is, we can get it back. But further to that, we are also investigating various options of data base replication (DBR), as discussed in Landwrap 19. With DBR, a full copy of all details in the Landonline database would be made and stored in near real-time on another database. In the advent of a disaster where EDS are unable to fully restore Landonline, details from the replication database would be used to make as close to a full recovery as possible.
Please don't share your Digital Certificate
When you use your Digital Certificate to logon to Landonline, the only person allowed to logon and work within Landonline with your Digital Certificate is you. It might sometimes seem convenient to allow others to sit at your desk and continue working, but it can become very inconvenient indeed.
Why? It's called Breaching Digital Certificates, and it's a serious security issue.
It will lead to your Digital Certificate being revoked. To get it back, you'll have to write a letter to LINZ acknowledging the breach, describe the actions you've taken to ensure that the breach doesn't happen again, and pay for a brand new Digital Certificate to be issued.
All this won't happen immediately. So as well as having to go through the above process, you'll also be unable to continue working on whatever you were working on when the breach occurred. And this can become frustrating not only for you, but for your clients as well.
All in all, if you need someone else's input, the only real option is to get them to logon using their own Digital Certificate (which typically needs to be at their pc). Remember, the Digital Signature is like your signature used in an electronic world – and you wouldn't share that.
For more information on Landonline Digital Certificate obligations, click here.
e-survey
New Version of the Survey Report Template
When the original Survey Report template was released in late 2004, it was intended that surveyors would copy and paste the template onto their own letterhead and go from there.
Surveyors found all of it useful. Phil Davison, a Business Analyst from the Christchurch LINZ office, says that about 90% of surveyors use the current template. Given this, LINZ has reviewed that template to see how we could improve it.
We have received feedback from both surveyors and LINZ staff, and have made the following changes:
- A header section has been added to allow for the entry of:
- the Plan Type (DP, SO or ML) and Number
- the Lodging Surveyor's name
- the Surveying Firm's name
- the Surveyor's reference (if any), and
- the LINZ barcode (if lodged with a manual plan).
- Three sections of the Report have been divided into sub-sections to clarify reported information:
- Section 2 has been divided into Survey Purpose and Dataset type
- Section 10 (Definition) has been divided into Boundaries and Monumentation, and
- Section 17 (Easements/Covenants) has been divided into New and Existing.
- Section 3, Dataset Components, has had additional fields added to cover standard supporting document types that are lodged with a dataset. It also allows for additional comments to be added if required.
- Standard formatting has been applied throughout the whole document.
The new template is clearer, and should be easier to use. It can be downloaded from the LINZ website.
New 0800 e-survey support staff
In preparation for 100% e-lodgement, and to cater for the uptake in e-survey lodgement, LINZ has recruited and are training five additional staff to support our e-survey customers. This means that our 0800 e-survey support team has grown from seven to twelve.
So if you ring the 0800 e-survey line, chances are you'll hear a new voice on the other end of the line.
The new voices belong to:
- Murray Campbell
- Roger Dennison
- Paul Garlick
- Janene Hunkin
- Sarah Kiwi
Janene Hunkin being mentored by Steven Russell
Murray, Roger and Janene are Property Rights Analysts, and Roger has recently been working on the Foreshore and Seabed project; between the five new members of the team, they have more than 89 years experience in LINZ and LINZ's predecessor departments.
That means that they know where you're coming from, they understand the issues and they have the knowledge and experience to be able to deal with them.
Training – e-survey
Some Landwrap readers will have already received their e-survey training information packs. If you have yet to receive your training pack, it should arrive by Monday 8 May. We sent them out in a staggered fashion so that we can more easily cope with handling the booking process. But if your pack hasn't arrived by 8 May, let us know (email linzinfo@linz.govt.nz) and we will send one out right away.
We encourage you to sign up sooner rather than later. The crucial date for surveyors is 1 September 2007; from this date, all survey firms will need to adopt electronic lodgement using Landonline e-survey.
As the information packs describe, LINZ offers e-survey training free of charge to all survey firms. Since September 2005, 46 firms have received the benefit of in-house training from one of our survey training specialists; LINZ has resources available to train your survey firm now and we are keen to do so, to help ensure you are in a strong position to lodge your surveys electronically by 1 September 2007.
If you have access to a licence through another branch or firm please let us know; you may still be eligible for training.
Further information on 100% e-lodgement is available on the Landonline website.
e-dealing
Training – e-dealing
Some Landwrap readers will already have received their e-dealing training packs. If you have, you will know when the trainers are available in your regions, and hopefully you will have decided which of the available dates best suits you.
If you have yet to receive your training pack, it should arrive by Monday 8 May; we sent them out in a staggered fashion so that we can more easily handle the booking process. But if your pack hasn't arrived by 8 May, let us know (email linzinfo@linz.govt.nz) and we will send one out right away.
When it does arrive, we need to know as soon as possible when you would like the training. If you don't, you risk:
- Not being able to be trained on the date best for you.
- Missing out on the training altogether (LINZ has the resources available to offer the training now, but those resources will not be available forever - there will only be limited opportunities for training after the dates specified in the training packs).
There are still a few training spaces available in late May, if you contact us (email linzinfo@linz.govt.nz) and confirm your booking this week.
Remember, LINZ provides this training to firms signing up to Landonline e-dealing – or upgrading from e-search to e-dealing – free of charge. For more information, please refer to Landwrap 20.
Regulatory
Mutual Land Covenant Schemes
Introduction
Mutual land covenant schemes that restrict or control land use or building styles are a common feature of modern multi-lot subdivisions.
Section 126A of the Property Law Act 1952 allows LINZ to note land covenants included in instruments presented for registration. Historically, this was limited to the title for the land subject to the burden of the covenant (the servient land).
Since the amendment to section 126A in 2002, there has also been the option to note the title for the land with the benefit of the covenant (the dominant land).
The complexity of mutual land covenant schemes occasionally gives rise to requisitions or queries in the registration process. Some suggestions for streamlining and simplifying the conveyancing associated with the establishment of these arrangements are set out below.
Creation of land covenants by individual transfer
The most commonly used method of securing mutual covenants was by means of a series of standard form transfers, in which:
- each purchaser covenants with the vendor developer to observe the covenants, for the benefit of all the other lots in the development;
- the developer covenants with each purchaser to impose similar covenants on every other lot; and
- each lot thereby becomes both dominant and servient land for the covenants in relation to all the other lots in the scheme.
While this method of creation is permissible, the incremental nature of the process means that it has certain disadvantages, for example:
- the documentation for each transfer must repeat all the details pertaining to the covenant arrangement;
- it takes some time (i.e. not until all the allotments in the subdivision have been disposed of) for the scheme to be fully implemented;
- there is greater potential for omission of covenants through conveyancing error;
- the transfer must be executed by both the transferor and the transferee (there has also been some debate as to whether the owners of all the other allotments receiving the benefit of the covenant must be a party to each transfer, but it is accepted that, for registration purposes, this is not required);
- because the documentation is more complex, the conveyancing costs associated with each disposition are presumably greater than those incurred on a simple transfer.
Creation of covenants prior to disposition - 'developer to developer'
A simpler and presumably more cost effective approach is to put the land covenant arrangement in place prior to the disposition of the affected allotments. This is provided for under the Property Law Act 1952 and the Land Transfer Act 1952.
Under section 66A of the Property Law Act, a person who transfers property to himself may covenant with himself, as an incident of that transfer. Such covenants are enforceable, as if the covenant had been made by that person with another person.
Sections 90A, 90E and 90F of the Land Transfer Act also allow land covenants to be created in the same form as an easement instrument (Form 3), even though the covenantor and covenantee are the same registered proprietor of both dominant and servient land.
A developer may therefore impose covenants on a subdivision, by transfer or easement instrument, before the allotments are separately disposed of.
If this is done at the time the subdivisional plan is deposited, the land covenants will be brought forward onto the new titles as they are issued and, by virtue of section 126A of the Property Law Act, will bind any future purchaser of the land from that point onwards.
A 'developer to developer' transfer containing land covenants must be executed by the subdividing landowner in the capacities both of transferor and transferee.
A 'developer to developer' easement instrument creating land covenants must be executed by the subdividing landowner in the capacities of both registered proprietor of the dominant and of the servient tenements.
LINZ recommends the adoption of 'developer to developer' easement instruments or transfers, wherever possible.
(see sections 90(3) and 90A(4) of the Land Transfer Act 1952 and Regulation 6 of the Land Transfer Regulations 2002).
Revocation or modification
Section 126A of the Property Law Act 1952 also allows an entry to be made in the register where a land covenant has been varied or revoked.
Any instrument purporting to vary or revoke a land covenant must be executed by the registered proprietors of the affected dominant and servient tenements.
The High Court also has jurisdiction to modify or extinguish land covenants under section 126G of the Property Law Act.
