Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand talks us through their work to modernise Landonline to ensure it remains world-class and that information about land in Aotearoa continues to be trusted and becomes more accessible.
Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) is modernising Landonline, New Zealand’s property rights platform, to ensure it remains world-class and that information about land in Aotearoa continues to be trusted and becomes more accessible.
LINZ’s Consulting Solicitor, Andrea Watson, says the products delivered to date have added significant value to customers.
People and businesses who transact with land and property rights, and who secure funding through loans against property, rely on services Toitū Te Whenua provides through Landonline to:
Andrea explains that New Zealand is one of the easiest places in the world to register property thanks to Landonline, our technology platform, which was introduced in 2000.
“Despite being more than 20 years old, Legacy Landonline is still recognised globally as a world-class property system and is a critical enabler of our economy.
“We’re future-proofing the technology and strengthening security to ensure we can continue to meet customers’ expectations.
“Starting in April 2019, this multi-year Modernising Landonline programme involves designing and building with our customers – they’re truly at the heart of this mahi.
“We’re also modernising how we work by building New Landonline in-house. We’re growing our capability to ensure New Landonline products continue to be enhanced and updated to meet the needs of our customers,” says Andrea.
New products we’ve delivered have a wide customer reach, including legal practitioners, surveyors, real estate agents, councils, banks, and the public.
Our public Land Record Search (LRS) enables members of the public – in New Zealand and most overseas countries – to search for and buy property records such as titles, survey plans or registered instruments direct from Toitū Te Whenua, without using a third party. Orders cost $6 each and are delivered almost instantly via email.
More than 125,000 property records were ordered through this service in the last financial year.
Our automated Notice of Change of Ownership (NoC) service is an example of how great outcomes for our customers can be achieved through collaboration between local and central government.
Notice of Change facilitates the legal process that’s required to update a relevant council’s rating database when property changes ownership.
“We’ve now largely automated that process through Landonline so councils are notified overnight following any land title registration.
As at October 2022, 50 of the 67 councils (or territorial authorities, TAs) in New Zealand have gone live with this service and both councils and legal practitioners are experiencing the benefits. These include improved data accuracy, less manual re-work and significant time savings (estimated by users as up to 10 minutes per transaction).
With an estimated 200,000 ownership changes taking place every year in New Zealand, the time savings – for legal practitioners and councils – are substantial.
“Despite being more than 20 years old, Legacy Landonline is still recognised globally as a world-class property system and is a critical enabler of our economy”
“Ongoing transparent and trusted relationships are critical to how we partner with TAs to work through the complexities of the data sharing agreements required to enable this service. These are often compounded by ensuring the data for each TA is formatted in a way that complements our system,” says Andrea.
Data sharing agreements also enable government to have access to TA data, which is useful for decision making.
“Our Web Search functionality makes it easy for registered Landonline ‘search only’ customers to search and order land records from any device without needing to purchase a Digital Certificate (a two-factor authentication security product otherwise required for registered Landonline customers).
“This year, customers ordered more than 1.1 million products using Web Search.”
We’re adding new functionality and enhancements to Web Search and LRS, along with more search tools in the future.
The first phase of the New Landonline – Dealings application will be available to registered Landonline users from November 2022.
This means registered Landonline users will be able to complete almost all sale and purchase and re-financing transactions in the new web-based application.
“We started piloting the new application in July 2021 and we now have more than 400 participants.
“When we go-live in November, we’ll have all the key features needed to process most transactions involving simple Discharge of Mortgage, Transfer and Mortgage instruments. Remaining functionality and enhancements will continue to be added over time.
“We’re using an Agile approach for our design, build and release phases. What that means is we incrementally release functionality, enabling legal practitioners to use it earlier and provide feedback, which informs the balance of our build.
“Until we’ve built all existing functionality in the new application, and are in a position to switch off Legacy Landonline, customers will be able to work interchangeably in either Landonline system (Legacy or New), as both systems will be fully compatible and integrated,” says Andrea.
We’re keen to hear from anyone who wants to find out more. Please email us at modernisinglandonline@linz.govt.nz.