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Start - Remote electronic access to real estate data

The days of queuing at the courts and at surveying and mapping authorities to get information about Slovenian real estate are long gone. Now, when someone needs information when purchasing real estate, securing loans or making valuations, or simply wants to know if the neighbour owns the house she lives in, this can easily be done free of charge while sitting in front of a computer.
Remote electronic access to the Slovenian Surveying and Mapping Authority provides easy access to public information on real estate kept in its registers (land, building and public infrastructure cadastres, a real estate register and a register of spatial units). GURS also operates records of the Slovenian real estate market where information on the legal transactions for the sale and lease of real estate are kept. All the registers can be accessed at http://e-prostor.gov.si/.
European funds helped also Slovenian municipalities to build upon the electronic access to their spatial data. Nowadays the data, still mostly for informative purposes, can be obtained online; some municipalities use the Spatial information municipalities system (www.geoprostor.net/PisoPortal/Default.aspx) while others have their own web sites (e.g. Ljubljana at https://urbanizem.ljubljana.si/UrbinfoWeb/profile.aspx?id=Urbinfo2@Ljubljana).
From 2004 check of land registry data is available on web. The link to electronic land registry excerpts is https://evlozisce.sodisce.si/evlozisce/javni_izpisi/list.html.

The newest thing - electronic land registry

As of May this year, the land registry is available online, full-on. The basic principles and the amount of required documentation remain unchanged, but number of eligible submitters is limited, while the e-service calls for electronic legal documents, type documents, e-signatures, e-delivery and centralised storage.
The prices of certain legal services have decreased, whereas the notary costs increased due to their key role in the procedures. Except in the rare cases of filing records in court, the notary has to be involved in the registry procedure, even if the notary has not filed the submission. In such cases the applicant has to submit to a notary the underlying documents (which must include a legal basis for the registration with notarised land registry permission) and the notary converts the documents to electronic form and submits them to the court.
Surely, the system has bugs. One journal is still publishing a series on user experiences, most of which were far from positive. The most criticised, however, was the land registry's decreased transparency, increased administration and irrational procedures, while in some cases errors in data transfer occurred.
Conclusion
Despite the numerous criticisms, nobody claims the system is bad, particularly as some problems are being solved. Nevertheless, the relevant authorities should learn something from dealing with the issues the users have reported. If anything, the ensuing digitisation of judicial procedures (first the expected digitisation of executive procedures) should only be introduced when the e-application functions fully and flawlessly.
 

Ana Filipov is a lawyer at Schönherr corporate law firm and an expert on real estate market