Land Registration Authority Pushes for Electronic Land Titles

QUEZON CITY, Philippines—The Philippine government through the Land Registration Authority (LRA) encourages land titles and deeds holders to surrender their copies and convert them to electronic copies. Upon conversion, the issued paper land title will be considered deactivated and obsolete. However, the government agency made it clear that the scheme will only cover “voluntary transactions”. An announcement by the LRA via Circular 16-2014 was released stating the implementing guidelines of the Voluntary Title Standardization Program under the Land Titling Computerization Project (LTCP). Under the implementing rules, the land titles on paper will only be converted to an electronic copy once the owner’s duplicate copy has been surrendered to the registry. And upon conversion, the manually issued title will become obsolete. “Henceforth, all succeeding transactions pertaining thereto shall be processed using the resulting eTitle,” the LRA added.

The inclusion of Information Technology in their services has equipped the LRA to improve its process of securing land titles for the benefit of the real estate industry. According to the agency, this change which was brought about by Republic Act 7718 (the “BOT Law”) will definitely improve the mechanism and strengthen the integrity of the Torrens System. Through the LTCP, queries on the status of a land title can be made anywhere, anytime from different Registries of Deeds in the country and the archaic paper-based generation and issuance of land titles will now be more efficient and protected through a paperless and electronic process. “The project seeks to maintain the security and integrity of records by safeguarding these titles from tampering or destruction and deter substitution or insertion of questionable data, and ensure the integrity of the land titling registration,” the LRA said in the circular.

All the necessary data provided in the manually issued title including the annotations will be encoded and thereafter examined and once certified to be complete with all the details, an electronic title (e-Title) will be transmitted to the head of the Registry of Deeds following the current LRA guidelines. This project aims to digitize all the records of the LRA in order to provide the public with enough security of their titles from loss due to fire, theft, natural disasters, and normal ravages of time.

At present, this could be a good sign of a better and more efficient process in securing land titles in the country. Dealing with land titles and real property tax could somehow be stressful and would demand for a greater weight of diligence. Hoppler provides for services in processing land titles, title transfer documentations and real property tax clearance. Contact the real estate brokerage firm for a trustworthy ally in dealing with your real property documents.