Economy

Automation targets 12-day land registration process

farida

Lands Cabinet Secretary Farida Karoney. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Land owners will from next month register property in a record 12 days from the current 73, Lands secretary Farida Karoney said Wednesday, citing the efficiency that comes with automation of records.

The Lands ministry will start dry runs on the Lands Information Management System on Friday (tomorrow) before it goes live from April 1, she said, adding that this will digitise most of the manual systems in property registration process.

“We have interrogated the systems, we want to see what we need to do to reduce that number (of days for property registration). We have managed to look at processes we can eliminate and merge. We think we will bring that to 12 days,” Ms Karoney told reporters in Nairobi.

It currently takes developers and landowners nine processes to register property largely through time-consuming manual systems which forces them to move from office to office.

They include title search which takes three days, land rent clearance (19 days), clearance of land rates (five days), consent to transfer clearance (nine days) and requisition of file valuation (four days), the Ministry says.

Other processes are site visits and reporting (20 days), registration of title (five days), payment of stamp duty (four days) and endorsement and assessment of the deal (four days).

Clearance of rent and rates as requisition of file valuation are the only procedures that are fully done online, while search of title, consent to transfer, title registration, payment of stamp duty and assessment and endorsement of the deal are partially digitised.

The remainder of the procedures are manual.

The ministry plans to condense the procedures into three steps to save time and costs involved in registering land.

Application for land rent clearance, consent to transfer and valuation of stamp duty will be lumped into one procedure, taking a maximum of five days, while site visits and report writing (maximum of seven days) and title registration (five days) will complete the registration process, Ms Karoney said.