Land registers - EU level

This section briefly discusses the actions taken to improve coordination between land registers at European level.

What is ELRA?

The European Land Registry Association (ELRA) is a non-profit association under Belgian law, consisting of 32 organisations representing the land registries of 25 European countries. Its primary purpose is the development and understanding of the role of land registration in real property and capital markets.

What does ELRA offer?

Under the Framework Partnership Agreement with EU-Level Networks, ELRA is developing different activities, such as workshops, to discuss the impact of European regulations on land registries and their customers. ELRA publishes the results of these activities as a collection of fact sheets on its website. One of the main roles of ELRA is also to provide expert advice to EU institutions on land-registry issues.

As part of the IMOLA I project, ELRA has developed an electronic template (the European Land Registry Document or ELRD), which can be used to display land registry information from any EU country, together with explanatory material in different languages. ELRA has also developed training courses to improve understanding of the different legal systems in different EU countries.

IMOLA II is an innovative follow-up project. Its goal is to promote an effective model of reference information, focused on descriptive metadata, to characterise the content of the information objects in the land registry system. This would make it more transparent and easier to understand. The objective of IMOLA II is to improve the clarity and interoperability of existing web information. The output will be designed to fit within the scope of the currently under development Land Registers Interconnection project (LRI), assuring the interoperability of data hosted in the IMOLA Knowledge Organisation System, (glossaries and thesauri). It will be accessible by means of a formal retrieval and visualisation system.

Another important ELRA project was CROBECO (Cross Border e-Conveyancing), which focused on cross-border registration in foreign land registers. The project received funding from the European Commission. The project aimed to facilitate a pan-European real-estate market by supporting foreign buyers of a (second) home in the EU.

For more details please visit the ELRA website.

ELRN

Within ELRA, the ELRN (European Land Registry Network) was set up in 2010 by ELRA members and aims to facilitate mutual cooperation among ELRA members. Currently, 28 ELRA members from 21 European countries have joined the network. Each organisation appoints a registrar (a land registry officer who is expert in property rights and land registration) as its contact point for the network.

The ELRN has created tools to facilitate access to their services at European level. Since 2012, it has also released a set of nine information fact sheets explaining different topics.

For more information please visit the ELRN website

Last update: 17/11/2021

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