It is proposed to make the data of apartment owners available to housing and communal services operators

Resource suppliers and companies managing residential buildings, having lost access to data on property owners since March 2023, have encountered difficulties in collecting debts from citizens for utility services. They ask the government to provide information, emphasizing that housing and communal services debt is already seriously growing. However, widespread access to such information may increase the risks of real estate fraud and illegal use of personal data, lawyers warn.

Kommersant learned that housing and communal services operators are asking to give them access to information about the personal data of debtor citizens they serve through GIS housing and communal services services from a letter sent on October 2 by a number of industry organizations and associations to Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin. Among the signatories are the United Housing and Communal Council, the Association of Regional Settlement Centers, and the Council of Energy Producers. Mr. Khusnullin’s office confirmed receipt of the letter, which is under consideration.

The authorities closed wide access to the Unified State Register of Real Estate, a database of real estate owners, in March 2023. Now this information is available only to spouses of home owners, their heirs, notaries, and banks. According to market participants interviewed by Kommersant, the closure of the Unified State Register followed, among other things, a wave of high-profile journalistic investigations based on data from this register. The authorities, however, motivated this by preserving personal data from unauthorized leaks.

The authors of the letter indicate that without data from the Unified State Register of Real Estate, housing and communal services operators cannot go to court to collect debts and this “jeopardizes the proper provision of services.” The appeal says that among housing and communal services operators the number of legal disputes reaches “several thousand applications” per month, but due to the lack of access to information about the owner of the property, the number of judicial penalties has decreased from 4 thousand to 400 monthly in each city. The authors of the letter emphasize that since March 2023, citizens’ debts to housing and communal services organizations have increased significantly.

By March 2023, according to Rosstat, Russians owed a total of 876.4 billion rubles for housing and communal services. Debts to resource supply organizations alone during this period increased by 15.8% year on year.

Housing and communal services operators are not the first to face problems due to lack of access to data on homeowners. Last year, companies managing apartment buildings asked to develop a mechanism that would allow them, through notaries and registrars, to maintain a database of home owners and notify them about general meetings of owners (see Kommersant, October 13, 2022). Such data is necessary for the management company, since they are required by law to maintain a register of owners of an apartment building, notes Sergei Kostyuchenkov, head of the entrepreneurship committee in housing and communal services of the Tula branch of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. And at the beginning of 2023, realtors, through Opora Rossii, asked to postpone the date of entry into force of amendments to the legislation that limited the possibility of independently obtaining extracts from the Unified State Register of Real Estate (see Kommersant of February 15). But these business requests were not satisfied. A Kommersant source familiar with the discussion of the issue says that Rosreestr is against access to personal data of property owners. The department did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

The head of Kuchembaev and Partners, Almaz Kuchembaev, doubts that housing and communal services operators will be able to gain access to the Unified State Register of Real Estate. “Wide access to the registry increases the risk of not only unauthorized use of citizens’ personal data, but also fraud in the real estate of Russians,” he believes. But there has not been a single high-profile case of abuse of information about the owner of real estate by housing and communal services organizations or similar structures, insists Andrey Muravyov, general director of IVKO 2000.

Housing and communal services organizations have the opportunity to obtain data through a notary, Mr. Kuchembaev believes. But this significantly increases the cost of services for management companies that manage hundreds of residential buildings, notes Nikita Chulochnikov, president of the Association of Real Estate Service Companies. At the same time, adds Andrey Muravyov, the applicant must prove to the notary that there is an agreement or any obligations between him and the owner of the property.

Daria Andrianova