Starting from December 1, Technical Inventarization Bureaus (TIB) in all oblasts of Ukraine, and from December 15 also in Kyiv, will not be accepting documents for ownership rights registration. This is caused by the Resolution on new real estate registration rules, which comes into effect on January 1. According to the initiative of the Ministry for Regional
Development and Building of Ukraine, private owners should also be involved into this process. Now the ministry is preparing a bill that will let organizations of other forms of property, as well as public utility enterprises, issue rights of ownership to citizens. At that people will be able to receive documents stating the condition of their property according to the the “single window” principle. “A person will hand the documents to the registrar, who will then contact the technical inventarization executors and find out who can provide the service at the lowest price and in the shortest terms, and then inform the customer of the result,” explained Minister of Regional Development and Building Anatolii Blyzniuk.
So far, the players on the domestic property market can say nothing good of the initiative launched by the ministry. Moreover, they say that the reorganization of the property ownership registration procedure, initiated in order to squeeze the public utilities monopolist out of the market, can entail a forced lull for property buyers and sellers, and for the market on the whole freezing or even collapse cannot be ruled out: in the next three month, before the new system resumes work, all purchase contracts will stop. “Starting on December 15, all Bureaus of Technical Inventory (BTIs) which had been responsible for registering property ownership rights are effectively stopping their operations. I have reliable information that two months ago all BTI employers signed an agreement to be made redundant,” revealed to The Day Yurii KORCHEV, head, Legal Committee of the Kyiv Municipal Department, Realtor Association.
Thus, if you failed to register your right to property before December 1 or December 15, you will have to wait until late February or early March. However, Korchev said that even the purchase contracts in the works, scheduled for signing these days, are being frozen now. He accounts for that by the impossibility to meet the conditions specified in those contracts. “Even now there are newly purchased properties which cannot be registered before the deadline, and we can do nothing about it,” complains the realtor. “In fact, we cannot offer anything to our customers today. You can buy property with the fully prepared package of documents even before December 15, and yet you won’t know what the registration procedure is. First of all, no one knows where this can be done in the span from December 15 to January 1. Moreover, it is totally unclear where you should go after January 1, since the State Register today only comprises two employees, the director and the secretary.”
However, according to Korchev, the innovation will also hurt those who have already registered their rights to ownership. “There is this governmental resolution No. 8296, which stipulates the registration procedure. It says that there exists a special State Register, and gives the registration fees. So, everyone who is going to register after January 1, 2011, shall pay the equivalent of seven non-taxable minimum wages (119 hryvnias). However, the same resolution says that individuals who register their ownership rights by 2012 shall pay 3.5 non-taxable minimum wages (59.5 hryvnias). Thus, this resolution effectively makes citizens re-register their rights,” said Korchev.
Yet he says that the norm is really ill-conceived. If an owner is not going to sell or hand down his property, he does not care if he is registered or not. “Literally, the resolution orders the owners to line up and march to the BTI to get the inventory papers, pay 400 hryvnias for that, and then go to the State Register and re-register their rights once again, this time for 59.5 hryvnias,” explains Korchev. “Thus it appears that the ownership rule has been virtually nullified in this country.”
