On the face of it, the Land Registration Act due to come into law in October and the route of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) have few obvious links. The former encourages property-owners to register their interests and gives them additional protection against factors such as adverse possession, while the latter needs to parcel over 6,000 properties along the route of the new rail line into a single lease.
The link is a piece of software known as Land Terrier, developed by Union Property to help it coordinate the data acquisition and management required for a project the size of the CTRL. The company believes the Land Terrier may have applications not just for other large-scale infrastructure projects but also for large property owners who wish to track their holdings, get their data into a digital form, and register it with the Land Registry to benefit from the new Act.
Land Terrier has its origins in 1998 when Union Property, a subsidiary of London & Continental Stations & Property, began the hunt for a computer program that would help it to organise the details of the largest compulsory purchase of the last century. After examining the market and consulting with the teams behind other similar projects, they realised that no suitable programs were available and that they would have to create their own.
Instead of developing an entirely bespoke system, Union Property took the pragmatic decision to use several off-the-shelf programs and work with their partners at Intergraph, a US-based Geographic Information Systems vendor, to integrate the different programs to provide the functionality and flexibility that the project needed.
“For all of the systems required, we kept thinking that someone must have done this before, can’t we buy it from someone else, is there an expert who’s gone down the same path because we didn’t want to duplicate effort,” says Stephen Jordan, managing director of Union Property. “The component parts of Land Terrier are all off-the-shelf: the Land Terrier is the glue that binds them. You may think there’s nothing revolutionary in that, but when we were looking, nobody had got to that application. We’re familiar with the other tools that are available, but it’s this overlay of disparate functionality that is unique to the Terrier.”
Although Land Terrier – the name is an archaic word for a register of property, and has nothing to do with small, tenacious dogs – was developed to solve problems associated with the CTRL, and can handle many of the unique difficulties that a 109-kilometre project involving the acquisition of 6,500 properties and 12,500 property interests creates, it has many uses outside that. Jordan and his team, including referencing manager Doug Geden and information and standards manager Andy Wilkinson, worked to create a tool that was open and flexible, with potential applications in several areas of the management of large property portfolios.
“Different organisations will be able to use it in different ways,” Doug Geden says. “We developed it as a generic tool for a company that has significant issues with property, be they buying and selling lots of land, trying to capture what they own in a static data-set or in terms of granting leases. All the tools are there.”
Alongside the software, Union Property has developed a set of procedures for integrating the system into any large project.
“We have to deliver to the Secretary of State a lease for the linear interests. To try to pull all that together without some form of integrated systems support would have been a nightmare,” Jordan says, “and if it wasn’t bedded in a firm procedure there would have been a risk that something would have fallen through the gaps. If you’re running a railway from the Channel Tunnel to here, you can’t have a gap in the middle.” The Union Property team has received ISO accreditation. “We start with the procedure,” he adds. “We’re not driven by the techie stuff. The techie stuff is providing us with solutions to procedures that we’ve already established.
“Nobody had done anything of the scale that we were confronting, nobody had to pull it all together like we did. Now that we’ve invented the wheel, there are a number of other large projects that may or may not come forward, and we’re happy to share our experience with them.”
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A ticket on the Registration Express |
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Land Terrier employs a range of mapping and data processing software packages, including Geomedia Professional and an Oracle database, to store and display all information about a property. It also uses such quotidian packages as Word, supports TIFF images for the graphics, and accepts property details downloaded from the Land Registry. The result is a system that can automate property transactions and the filling out of forms, two requirements of the Land Registration Act 2003 |
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Land Terrier facilitates compliance with the Land Registration Act 2003 |
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Land Terrier is designed to simplify the digitisation of information on large and complex property holdings. That means, as the arrival of the Land Registration Act on 13 October 2003 draws closer, anyone with responsibility for such a portfolio should be considering it as a possible solution. The Act does not make it compulsory to register landholdings, but it will afford greater legal protection to those who do. At present roughly 20% of property titles in the UK, with a potential value of up to £500bn, are not listed with the Land Registry. In addition, the registration of property will make e-conveyancing – another aim of the new Act – a great deal easier if the information is already held in digital form. Property owners should also consider the business benefit of knowing the exact details of the properties on their books. Two of the UK’s largest landowners that have not registered are Railtrack (now Network Rail) and the Crown Estates. Both have legal reasons why they prefer not to – not to mention the enormous logistical task that digitising such a bulk of data would be. But Land Terrier or systems like it can potentially help with making the task manageable. Although Union Property is not actively marketing the software, it has expressed a willingness to talk to any interested parties, in order to share its expertise in this matter. |
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A concentration of disparate but related tools for gathering data |
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The Land Terrier system links physical data about properties with intelligent maps. It uses an Oracle database combined with the Geomedia Professional software to store all information about each property, and a case-management tool to deal with changes to that information. The Geomedia tools support Ordnance Survey landline data and the geo-referencing of plans that have been scanned into the system. Land Terrier uses the most common document formats – Microsoft Word for text files; Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) for graphics – and can completely automate all aspects of property transactions, including preparing physical or digital copies of legal documents. Perhaps most importantly, it has been designed to accept data from electronic property details downloaded from the Land Registry. “The Land Registration Act of 2003 offers registered proprietors more protection against adverse possession. So there’s a big business driver for large landowners with a lot of unregistered land to undergo a process of voluntary first registration,” Doug Geden comments. “We’ve put the tools into the Land Terrier system for the first registration processes that need to be undertaken, and for the automation of the production of the forms and plans necessary to support the application.” “We’ve had a lot of dialogue with the Land Registry,” adds Stephen Jordan. “Being where we are at the leading edge of this stuff, they’ve been interested to see what we’ve been doing in terms of electronic records and their use. We’re a bit of a test-bed, I think.” |
