Update on the Land Registry of Northern Ireland
Published 22 May 2020
Further to our blog titled ‘Land Registry Closure’ (published 28 April 2020), where we looked at the impact of this closure on all current and new property transactions, the Land Registry has now announced a roadmap for restarting the majority of services. There are six areas of service which Land Registry has confirmed will resume but the most important are as follows:
Any priority note currently registered on the Register with an expiry date on or after 25 March 2020, will have an expiry date of 8 June 2020 (in accordance with Rule 188).
Any priority search application received in the Registry on or prior to 24 March 2020 but not yet registered, will have a priority period of 40 working days from 8 June 2020.
Any priority search application lodged in the Registry from 25 March 2020, will have a priority period of 40 working days from 8 June 2020.
Draft priority notes will be entered on to the Register prior to 8 June 2020 to enable speedy registration from 8 June 2020 and priority search certificates will start to issue from this same date.
Service for new priority search applications will resume from 8 June 2020.
Land Registry will accept all new applications for the Land Registry Register from 8th June 2020. Any applications received between now and 8 June 2020 will be held and deemed received on 8 June 2020.
In addition to the above, Land Registry is now accepting correspondence (including objections) for existing cases and will be available to take telephones calls after 26 May 2020.
We were also delighted to be a part of the pilot scheme for the new LandWeb Direct service which enables users to top up accounts by card. We at MKB Law welcome these positive developments from the Land Registry.
