Land registration in the European Union

This contribution gives an overview of European developments with regard to land registration. Land registration has different functions from a legal and governmental perspective, but is crucial to property rights as it realises their enforceability. It remains one of the strongest safe harbours in national property law, free from European influence. However, informal harmonisation is clear on the level of: (1) European groups which undertake efforts to facilitate cross-border real estate transactions, and (2) national case law. With regard to the latter, the corrections and mitigations on both sides of the positive or negative nature of land registration systems are such that one could wonder whether it is still useful to pit these systems against each other.