Unified address registry: a vain idea or protection against fraud with real estate?

Andriy Trigub, associate partner of Skliarenko, Sydorenko and Partners, for the JURLIGA portal.

The Cabinet of Ministers attended for the idea of launching a single address registry in Ukraine. At one of the last government meetings An Inter-Agency Working Group on its creation, as well as approved the position (decree of 10.10.2018 №822).

According to the initiators, the creation of such a register will facilitate the introduction and accumulation of the most reliable information about the addresses of the objects that have been assigned in accordance with legislation. This will prevent the commission of illegal actions with real estate, in particular, will make it impossible to duplicate these addresses when registering rights to various real estate objects. On the other hand, it will also be impossible to register the same object at different addresses.

Practicing lawyers are well aware that it is precisely the manipulation of addresses that often underlies various illegal schemes in real estate, so the very idea of establishing order here looks quite reasonable.

Only the systematization of addresses is already provided for by law. So, taking into account the data of the state land cadastre at the national and regional levels, a distributed geographic information system has already been created - the town planning cadastre (the Statute on it was approved by the Cabinet of Ministers of June 25, 2011 No. 559). A part of this cadastre is a register of addresses in the city. And in Kiev, for example, the urban planning cadastre with the register of addresses been functioning for a long time.

However, the effectiveness of its work, in fact, poor. An example is a case from a practice involving a dispute between an investor and a developer. The court as an interim measure under the investor’s claim has prohibited re-registration of ownership of the apartment. However, later it turned out that the developer has changed the address of the house at the stage of its commissioning. Because of this, the ban imposed by the court did not formally act, and the developer was able to re-register ownership of the disputed property. The state registrar re-registered the apartment, because at that time, however, as now, the procedure for state registration of rights to real estate and their encumbrances does not contain requirements for the presence of a new building in the city’s address register. Such schemes are also often used to “neutralize” the seizure of property.

That is why the key point in the implementation of the idea of creating a Single Address Registry should be the emergence of such mechanisms that will not allow to “bypass” it.