In 2022, we updated our strategic objective from 'completing the land register’ to ‘delivering the benefits of a completed land register’.
The intention behind a completed land register is to deliver two key benefits:
- quick and efficient land and property transactions
- data and insight to improve transparency and better answer the question ‘who owns Scotland?’
Reason for the change
For RoS to add property to the Land Register the:
- property needs to be:
- bought or sold
- re-mortgaged
- current owner must choose to undertake a voluntary registration
For some properties this is unlikely to ever happen, or it might not happen for a long time. For example, social housing or some large rural estates are unlikely to regularly change owners.
In these cases, unless the property owner voluntary registers the property, the land details will not appear in the land register.
Delivering the benefits of a completed Land Register
The longer-term goal will continue to be 100% land register completion.
However, a focus on delivering the benefits means that we can continue to meet customer needs now, without having to wait for all land and property in Scotland to transact.
We will achieve this through our:
- approach to making the information contained in ‘work in progress’ cases more visible
- strategy to reduce the overall volume and age of open casework
- work to ‘unlock’ the information contained in the Register of Sasines
Further information
Find out more about how our work on unlocking sasines is progressing and how it will contribute to improved transparency.
Access our Corporate Plan to find out more about our strategy to tackle open casework.
Visit our data pages to see our current performance on land register completion.
Visit our KPI pages to view our progress milestones.