1.1 LAND REGISTRATION IN HUNGARY - BACKGROUND

Hungary has an area of 93,000 sq. km and a population of 10.5 million. There are currently over 7 million property records and 55,000 cadastral maps, which are maintained at the 115 District Land Offices. There are 19 County Land Offices which are responsible for the administration, budgeting, quality control, and the hearing of appeals against District Land Office decisions. This network is administered by a central Department of Lands and Mapping, located within the Ministry of Agriculture in Budapest. The Institute for Geodesy, Cartography and Remote Sensing (FÖMI) provides research and development, and also technical and administrative support to the network. Prior to the commencement of the EU PHARE Computerisation of Land Offices Project, the Land Registration System was almost totally based on paper records consisting of cadastral maps (boundary information) and property sheet records which record the property description, ownership information, and any financial or other burdens on the property (i.e. the legal and administrative records). A land compensation programme has been enacted whereby areas of land are redistributed to former owners or other compensation claimants and this has created an effective 2.1 million new land parcels, involving more than five million hectares. All of this has to be managed, auctioned, divided, set out, and the results assimilated into the land register. New professional regulations and respective standards are under elaboration with special emphasis on specific Hungarian circumstances, the European approach as well as initiatives and trends in digital mapping and information technology in general.

The Land Registration Sector is a key component of a free market economy whereby the safe and secure transfer of Title can be freely conveyed. In Hungary, as in many other European countries, the Government acts as the guarantor of title through the act of registration of property which records all required legal, administrative, financial and physical description information within the system of the register and upon the cadastral map. The map records are tied to the legal and property records by means of a unique identifier. In Hungary, this system is largely in place, and coupled with the decentralised nature of the Hungarian system, the system provides the large scale basis for the collection and recording of other land related data (land use and classification, land protection) and thus forms a true multipurpose cadastre. The multipurpose nature of the Land Registration System forms a potentially valuable state asset. (note that other European countries, including those from W.Europe are trying to move towards this kind of system). The conclusion from this is that the form of Land Registration system as practised in Hungary is fundamentally sound and should be retained.

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