By Ioanna Mandrou

An agreement was reached with the representatives of notaries and the ministries of Justice and Digital Governance regarding the digital submission of contracts to the land register.

After a meeting held at the Ministry of Justice by Minister Giorgos Floridis and the participation of Deputy Ministers Ioannis Bougas and Konstantinos Kyranakis from the relevant ministries as well as representatives of notaries, it was agreed to start implementing the reform with the digital file transfer of real estate from its first new year.

From the meeting where issues that had caused reactions from the notaries who had decided to abstain from next Monday in Athens and Thessaloniki were also resolved, from now on all the notaries will use the digital property transfer file on a pilot basis.

In particular, for each purchase and sale, the necessary supporting documents will be gathered and a copy of the contract will be digitally submitted to the land registry.

However, the specific regulation does not modify, the way of drawing up notarial deeds, the provisions of substantive law, concerning the way of acquisition of real rights of both the State and individuals, as defined in the text of the Civil Code and in the special laws. In other words, the contract as a legal text will continue to be drawn up as it has been until now, but it will be digitally submitted to the land registry in order to make the relevant process happen quickly and to avoid the current delays.

THE new process will include the following stages:

Initiation of transaction exclusively by the Notary: The transaction is initiated with the entry in the digital transfer file of the KAEK to be transacted and the invitation to contracting parties, via gov.gr. At the start of the transaction, the KAEK “locks” so that no other transaction for the same properties can be carried out at the same time until the completion of this one.

Extraction of Documents with interoperability: After receiving the necessary authorizations, the notary extracts, through the digital transfer folder, the necessary documents from AADE, EFKA, TEE, Land Registry.

Contract Signature: The notary uploads the certified copy of his contract in digital form to the application, signed with his own electronic signature.
The manner in which the notary maintains his record as well as the control of the legal capacity of the contracting parties are issues in which the Ministry of Digital Governance does not intervene and are still regulated by the existing legislation.

The ways of digital posting are the following:

a) Upload an open (readable) .pdf file, accompanied by a json or xml file containing the details of the transaction. Files with handwritten references and scanned files are not accepted.

b) Use of an external application that the notary already uses. The Ministry of Digital Governance for this purpose has developed and provides free support to software companies, an interface guide and a special interface (API).

Digital submission and payment of fees to the Land Registry

The submission of the file to be transferred to the Land Registry is carried out exclusively through the application at the last step of the process, where the buyer can pay fees using a card or bank code.

The Ministry of Digital Governance is committed to carrying out the transfer in one day, as long as the application of the digital transfer of real estate file is used. In the event that issues of invalidity arise, it is committed to respond to the buyer within a corresponding period of time.

Start a digital transfer folder

The start time of the application is defined as 1/1/2024. The Ministry of Digital Governance and the Land Registry are committed to examining and incorporating comments and improvements that will be proposed by the country’s Notarial Associations so that the operation of the application is orderly for professionals and to reduce the suffering of citizens.

Future digital tools or applications

Any digital tool or application that is going to be created in the future, even if it is an implementation of what is foreseen in an already announced tender and concerns the way or the place of drawing up a notarial deed, will be created under the supervision of the Coordinating Committee of Notarial Associations of Greece, to which it will belong, as and the sole responsibility of operating, maintaining and hosting the relevant digital tool or application.