Background, quality and methodology


Background

Registers of Scotland (RoS) is the non-ministerial office responsible for maintaining 20 public registers. These relate to land, property and other legal documents.

RoS collects administrative data in the process of fulfilling the Keeper of the Registers of Scotland’s (the Keeper) statutory duties to manage, control and maintain the various public registers under RoS’ remit.

Two of RoS’ most active registers are the General Register of Sasines and the Land Register of Scotland, which both record ownership and other interests related to land and property in Scotland.

The contents of the Sasines Register, which comprises a chronological list of deeds, are steadily being moved across to the Land Register. The Land Register was introduced in 1981 and currently (as at 31 December 2022) accounts for 1.89 million registered titles in Scotland. The Land Register is based on the Ordnance Survey map and contains plans of registered properties, providing property owners with a state-backed guarantee of title.

RoS records the legal owner of all land and property types in Scotland, including residential and commercial properties, whether held by an individual, a company or any other legal entity, and regardless of whether that company has been registered in the UK or not.

Since December 2014, where the legal owner is a company outwith UK, the register has recorded the country or territory where the company was incorporated. This information may also have been recorded prior to that date if it was included in the application for registration, but this was on a voluntary basis.

The data is submitted to RoS via standard land register application forms, deeds and accompanying plans (if required). It is used to maintain an open and public property register showing textual details for each title and its corresponding spatial extent on the cadastral map.

Information about individual registered titles can be accessed by the public. Scotland’s Land Information Service, ScotLIS, allows easy access for everyone to a wide range of land and property information. Customer Services are available for any other needs, such as searching the Land Register and Sasines Register, or getting copies of deeds.

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