HM Land Registry (HMLR) requisitions increased slightly in the opening quarter of the year despite consecutive improvements in the final half of 2019.
Between January and March 2020, 13.6 per cent 12.8% of all applications made to HM Land Registry resulted in a requisition.
This represented a 0.8 per cent increase from the 12.8 per cent return rate experienced in the final quarter of 2019.
Between January and March 2020, a total of 855,890 applications were made to HMLR. Of that number, 116,247 requisitions were returned because the information provided was incorrect, inaccurate or failed to offer the relevant detail.
Although some major conveyancing firms and lenders such as Abbey National PLC were able to send over 18,000 requests to HMLR without receiving a single requisition, some organisations still have an extremely high bounce back rate.
Overall, the information was broken down by application types including register updates, first registrations, new leases and transfers of parts.
In the opening quarter of 2020, 730,937 register update applications were made to HMLR with 85,665 requisition applications returning to source. This represented a 11.7 per cent return rate.
15,180 depositionary first lease (DFL) (new lease) applications were returned to sender between January and March from a total of 31,528; representing an average bounce back rate of 48 per cent, another 1 per cent decline from the final quarter of 2019.
Whilst this figure remains high, the requisition rate ended the year below 50% for the first time in 2019 and continued this trend in 2020. In 2018, the return rate for this type of application was 49.6%.
27,997 transfer of part (TP) applications were sent to HMLR in Q1 with 12,593 requisitions being sent back to the firms to provide greater clarity. This indicates a return rate of 45 per cent, almost a 10% fall from the 53.4% bounce back rate in the third quarter of 2019 and marginal increase on the 44.6 per cent return rate at the end of last year.
2,809 of the number of first registration (FR) applications lodged by customers in the opening quarter data, which totalled 7,514 applications, were returned for improvements. The bounce back rate of 37.38 per cent represented a marginal decrease on the previous quarter’s 37.7 per cent bounce back rate.
HMLR were clear that in some cases these requisitions were not the fault of the conveyancer, but the registry exercising rule 17 of the Land Registration Rules 2013 to elicit more information.
Are these requisitions avoidable? Do conveyancers need to become more accurate in order to ensure a smoother and faster application process?
This article contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2019. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
One Response
Conveyancers enjoy a restrictive practice under the reserved matters regime and should lose this this if an acceptable bounce back rate is not achieved.