The rebuild of New Zealand's land title system Landonline will be finished in 2024, Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) says in its annual report for the year to 30 June 2019.
It says Landonline needs to be future proofed against its ageing technology and Cabinet has approved the rebuild. The work programme is funded from a $95 million repayable Crown capital injection and $33 million from LINZ's capital reserves over five years.
"The rebuild will be completed in four tranches using Agile delivery methodology with a blend of in-house and New Zealand-based IT professionals. A single stage business case for each tranche must be approved by Ministers before funding is released," LINZ says.
It says a "considered and staged approach" is being taken within each tranche of the rebuild.
"We will complete work in small increments in tandem with continuous engagement and customer feedback from stakeholders. This will enable us to demonstrate the direct value to customers and keep the confidence of core stakeholders during the rebuild."
LINZ says the first tranche of the rebuild has started "and is focusing on delivering early wins for the customer, such as the ability to search, order and pay for LINZ products through any device. Customers will also be able to connect their systems to Landonline through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)."
It says the first tranche will be completed by the end of June 2020 "which then sets the foundation for more challenging work in subsequent tranches".
Landonline performance
Elsewhere in the report LINZ reports on the performance of Landonline. The measure "Landonline system is available to customers in accordance with agreed times [7am to 9pm Monday to Thursday, 7am to 7pm Friday, and 9am to 5pm Saturday]" has a Budget standard of 99.5%. In the year to 30 June 2019 the actual performance was 99.9%.
The measure "The time for processing title transactions is maintained or improved [the baseline is an average processing time of 6.5 days, with 99% of titles processed within 33.2 days]" is shown as "achieved". The average processing time in the 2018/19 year was 6.02 days, with 99% of titles processed within 21.3 days.
The measure "Title registration accuracy is maintained or improved [a target error rate of less than 0.2%]" is shown as "achieved", with the error rate in 2018/19 0.12%.
During the year to 30 June 2019 LINZ's survey and title system achieved total revenue of $68,298,000, compared to total revenue in the previous year of $69,366,000. Total expenses in 2018/19 were $70,259,000 ($82,250,000 in 2017/18), for a net deficit of $1,961,000 (a net deficit of $12,884,000 in 2017/18).
Land Transfer Act 2017
LINZ says the Land Transfer Act 2017 which came into effect on 12 November 2018 was the largest land registry system change it has delivered since implementation of the Land Transfer (Computer Registers and Electronic Lodgement) Amendment Act 2002.
"Enacting the Land Transfer Act 2017 involved extensive updates to Landonline and the creation of a new set of regulatory interventions."
LINZ says that overall the move to the new legislative framework was successful. "This was due to taking a partnership approach with our stakeholders. The New Zealand Law Society gave positive feedback on the education and training we provided."