The leadership of the Greek National Cadaster was bombarded yesterday by lawyers and notaries. The main reason being the significant delays in the registration of deeds and the issuance of certificates by the cadastral offices which can take up to sixteen months. The representatives of the two associations claim that the dysfunctions of the Cadaster are responsible for the “freezing” of the real estate market, requesting that a solution be found.

The president of the Greek National Cadaster, Dimitris Stathakis, had consecutive meetings yesterday with the representatives of the Bar Association and the Notaries’ Association of Athens. “There is a significant lack of personnel at the cadastral offices”, states the president of the Bar Association of Athens, Dimitris Vervesos, to the newspaper “Κ”. “Throughout Greece, there are thousands of pending applications for obvious errors, which is the simplest issue. Most offices take around six months to issue a certificate. For example, the cadastral office of Athens takes three months, the cadastral office of Zografos ten months, the cadastral office of Papagos sixteen months. Not even court judgments are registered quickly. The heavy industry of the country is suffering, nothing moves in the real estate market. Who can wait six months to transfer property, who will be able to get a loan when the bank cannot transcribe the mortgage?”

According to Mr. Vervesos, the lawyers who were hired as contractors to help with the processing of all the pending cases have not been paid and will start leaving soon. “The lawyers are paid for every 100 deeds that they deliver. However, when there is a lot of work at the office, the deeds are not registered and they remain unpaid”, he adds.

A similar image was painted by Giorgos Rouskas, the president of the Notaries’ Association of the Courts of Appeal of Athens, Piraeus, the Aegean and the Dodecanese. “There are thousands of pending applications for the correction of obvious errors, thousands of deeds which cannot be transcribed. In fact, for a huge amount of properties no transactions can presently be made”, says Mr. Rouskas. “At the same time, there is a very serious problem: there are no unified rules which apply to all cadastral offices. Each supervisor follows his own rules, and the notaries cannot know what requirements they will meet”. The president of the Greek National Cadaster, Dimitris Stathakis, believes that the discussion is productive since these are real issues. “Manning the offices is very slow because the candidates must go through the ASEP procedure. But gradually 227 people will be employed – the first 77 have already started their new duties”, he mentioned to “K”. “The problem which was created with the lawyers’ contracts will be resolved immediately. We believe that within the next couple of months, the situation with be normalized and the response times of the offices will improve. Regarding the “common rules”, this is an issue which we can study, since a great number of land registries has closed and has been absorbed by the Cadaster. The Cadaster is in a transition period and I believe that the situation will soon be normalized.”

Source: KATHIMERINI