HM Land Registry (HMLR) requisitions fell for the second consecutive quarter at the end of 2019.
Between September and December 2019, 12.8% of all applications made to HM Land Registry resulted in a requisition.
This represented an almost 2% improvement from the 14.75% return rate experienced in the opening quarter of 2019.
Quarter on quarter, the number of requisitions returned was also 0.1% lower than the third quarter of 2019 when 12.9% of all applications were returned to sender.
Between September and December 2019, a total of 869,370 applications were made to HMLR. Of that number, 111,566 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 thousands of 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.
For the third quarter of 2019, 760,726 register update applications were made to HMLR with 81,844 requisition applications returning to source. This represented a 10.75% return rate; representing a marginal increase from the 10.4% bounce back rate in the third quarter of the year.
Between July and September, 30,235 depositionary first lease (DFL) (new lease) applications were made with 14,204 requests for information being sent back; a bounce back rate of 49%.
Whilst this figure remains high, the requisition rate ended the year below 50% for the first time in 2019. In 2018, the return rate for this type of application was 49.6%.
27,398 transfer of part (TP) applications were sent to HMLR in Q4 with 12,244 requisitions being sent back to the firms to provide greater clarity. This indicates a return rate of 44.6%, almost a 10% fall from the 53.4% bounce back rate in the previous quarter.
3,274 of the number of first registration (FR) applications lodged by customers in the fourth quarter data, which totalled 8,670 applications, were returned for improvements. The bounce back rate of 37.7% represented a marginal increase on the previous quarter’s 37% 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.
