RoS - parliamentary guide

ScotLIS – Scotland’s Land Information Service - enables citizens and businesses to access land and property information. When supporting constituents, you can use ScotLIS to search the Land Register to:

• Find property owners and prices
• View boundaries on a map
• Check if land or property is on the Land Register or the historic Sasine Register

To find out more information, including current owners, your constituents can buy deeds or title documents.

If you are having problems finding what you need you can ask us to conduct a search for you. This will have an administrative fee attached for constituents.

The Land Register is our main register, it is a modern, map based, digital resource. The Sasine Register is the oldest national public land register in the world, dating back to 1617.

We are working to move records over from the Sasine to the Land Register.

While we will work with you whenever we can to help resolve an issue, there are a number of areas that we don’t hold information on. These include:

• how old a property is or how many bedrooms it has
• a phone number for the current owner
• details of alterations or building works on a property

You can get help tracing the history of buildings as well as births, deaths and marriages from National Records of Scotland.

We cannot comment on planning permission or act in a judicial capacity.

• An issue with historic conveyancing
• Discrepancies between the legal extent and the occupied extent of a property
• A disagreement with what is contained in the Ordnance Survey base map
• An error, either by the applicant or the Keeper

Where a boundary dispute exists, RoS may be able to assist by:

• Providing information on property ownership, such as identity of owners or extent of property boundaries.
• Providing copies of historical conveyancing deeds (including plans)
• In certain circumstances, where the dispute relates to a manifest inaccuracy in a Title Sheet, the Keeper may be able to rectify the register to reflect the correct position

Signpost your constituent to the relevant action to resolve their issue. This may include:

• Your constituents seeking independent legal advice to resolve their boundary issue. This may include arbitration or mediation
• Advising your constituents on how to contact the Keeper to apply for rectification of their title
• Advising your constituents how they make an appeal to the Lands Tribunal for Scotland

If a property is rented, you can search the landlord register. This can help to identify whether a landlord is registered, who manages a property or check which local authority a property is registered in. This can be helpful in resolving disputes. Inclusion in the register is mandatory for all landlords.

• If after searching the land register you can’t find the property you are looking for, but have the postal address, you can fill in our property help form. Depending on the nature of the search this service may incur a cost
• If you are searching without a postal address, you can use our land title investigation service. Investigations for areas of land can be time consuming and complex. They are carried out by our highly experienced search team and will be charged
• RoS launched the Register of Persons Holding a Controlled Interest in Land (RCI) on 1 April 2022. The Register will increase public transparency over decision making concerning land. It will ensure there can no longer be categories of owner or tenant where, intentionally, or otherwise, control of decision making is obscured. There is a two year period to register, until 1 April 2024, before offence provisions for non-compliance in RCI come into force

We are happy to help in any way we can to support you in your constituency duties as well as in your role as a parliamentarian.

We engage with parliamentarians in a number of ways:

• You will have access to our Customer Services staff for all of your enquiries as well as our subject matter experts for complex cases
• You and your staffers have an open invite to come along for a visit to RoS (virtual or otherwise) to ask questions and find out more about what we do
• You will receive regular updates from RoS on the most important developments to be aware of in terms of land registration and other responsibilities
• We will be in regular correspondence with the relevant committees and will appear before those committees when invited
• We will interact with other relevant parliamentary groups on a regular basis
• RoS participates in an annual survey which gathers MSPs views and experiences. We would encourage you to participate in this survey to help better inform our future engagement

Our Keeper and Chief Executive is directly accountable to the Scottish Parliament, and our staff are civil servants. We charge for our services and are part funded from the Scottish Government Consolidated Budget. Although RoS is a non-ministerial office, we do have a Minister who speaks for us in Parliament. Scottish ministers also have a number of powers and duties in relation to the discharge of the Keeper’s functions.

Find out more by reading our:

• Framework Document
• RoS Board
• Corporate Plan