THE Land Registration Authority (LRA) urged the public to avail of their Title Verification System (TVS) as a way to avoid being victimized by land scams.
Lawyer Renato Bermejo, LRA Administrator, said through the TVS, their clients can determine if titles they acquired are fake or not.
“How can you detect fake titles when it is not you who issued it? However, before, there was no transaction in the Registry of Deeds for that. Now, you can demand for that using the system,” Bermejo told SunStar Cebu.
But since LRA started implementing the TVS in 2018, only 85 individuals nationwide have used it, Bermejo lamented.
LRA is the government agency implementing and protecting the Torrens system of land titling and registration, as well as registration of transactions involving personal properties.
Bermejo said to avail themselves of TVS, interested lot buyers could just present the title of the property they plan to buy to the Registry of Deeds and pay the service fee of P147 per title.
“More or less it’s like an assurance for the buyer,” he said.
Moreover, the LRA also introduced its Transaction Preview Notice (TPN) project wherein the public is given the opportunity to examine entries, which will appear in their certificate of land titles.
When registering a land title to the LRA, one has to undergo four steps that are the entry, encoding, examination, and approval.
The first part of the TPN project deals with the examination process.
“Before, the examination was exclusively a job of the government (the LRA.) Now, the public is allowed to examine. That is a reform on the examination process of the RD,” he said.
Bermejo said it is important that the public is given the chance to evaluate entries in the documents since a court approval is necessary before a correction can be made in an already approved, but erroneous, certificate of title.
Under the project, the landowner will be given a preview of the notarial details (initially encoded by the LRA) that will appear in the certificate of land titles for him to doublecheck the entries.
Within two days upon receiving the preview copy, he must inform the LRA of any necessary changes to be made in the details. Otherwise, the entries will be considered as is.
Bermejo added that before this year ends, they hope to make the website they are currently working on, the citizen’s land registration portal, accessible to the public. (WBS)