The first step towards the transition to your era Land Registry Athens do on Monday. land Registry it is now being replaced by the Transitional Land Office with digital registration of all documents and the possibility of digital search in its archives. The second and most important step will take place in the summer when the office moves into the final structure of the Land Registry, offering all digital services. At the same time, the office in Athens will move to a new building within a year.

On March 1, after many years and various “waves”, the registration of land in the municipality of Athens was officially completed. The Athens Mortgage Office was closed on Thursday and Friday to make the “transition” from the old system to the new one, as it will reopen as a land office on Monday. As the President of the Hellenic Land Registry Dimitris Statakis explains to K.“the main plus is that we are moving from the outdated system of transfers and mortgages in books (which does not have a spatial reference) to the modern digital system of the Land Register with a spatial reference using a single map and reference code (KAEK) for easy real estate search. From now on, every transaction is registered in the digital cadastral database of the Greek Land Registry.”

Professionals (lawyers, notaries, engineers) are invited from Monday to work in the new structure, which is already active for the other two areas that were in the Athens Mortgage Registry, Galatsi and Moschato (they were registered earlier). The three main changes are as follows:

• An extract from the cadastral map (instead of the cadastral certificate of ownership) will be requested for all transactions.

• Professionals will have access via the Internet to the cadastral database of real estate in the municipality of Athens, avoiding the tedious process of searching for books.

In the summer, the office will move to the final structure of the Land Registry, and traders will have access to all its digital services.

• “Filing fee” will increase by 1 per thousand.

“We expect that in the middle of the summer the cadastral office of Athens will be included in the structure of the Land Registry of Greece (so until then it will still be under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, as well as mortgage offices). When this happens, those who deal with the Land Registry will be able to use all of its digital services, electronic payments, etc.”

The Athens Land Office is one of the largest in the country, with 1.33 million registered titles. In 2022, 34,056 transactions were conducted in the special mortgage registry, of which the majority (24,102) related to the transfer of real estate, and the rest – to other transactions (mortgage, conversion of promissory notes into mortgages, arrests, liquidations, seizures, lawsuits, deletions and notes). In the same year, 10,627 applications were submitted for copies of contracts and certificates.

At the same time, a tender is being held to “move” the office to a new building. Two proposals have been submitted for buildings in the wider area and the move is expected to take place in October. Work on the digitization of books of the office, estimated at 21 million pages, will begin earlier, as the first of the contracts for a major project to digitize mortgage office documents (financed by the Recovery Fund) has already been signed.

The integration of the Cadastral Office of Athens into the Greek Land Registry will complete a long process that began 15 years ago. In particular, declaration of property by citizens and companies was carried out in 2008-2009. At this stage, 833,000 property declarations were filed, covering 1,251,000 active property rights. But the creation of the digital database, which was exhibited as a separate project, began in 2016 due to legal complications. And it officially closed on March 1, two weeks ago, preceded by a March 2019 pre-publication and a June-October 2020 publication.