Realtors are asking for an extract – Newspaper Kommersant No. 28 (7473) dated 02/15/2023

Restrictions on obtaining extracts from the Unified State Register of Real Estate (EGRN), which will come into force in March, will complicate the business of realtors, landlords and classifiers. Through Opora Rossii, entrepreneurs are asking to postpone this measure until the official launch of a special service for verifying the information received. Market participants believe that because of the innovation, the main risks will be borne by buyers and tenants of housing, who will not be able to quickly receive information about the owners of real estate.

At the disposal of Kommersant was a letter from Opora Rossii to the head of the Ministry of Digital Transformation Maksut Shadayev and the head of Rosreestr Oleg Skufinsky with a request to initiate a postponement of the entry into force of amendments that limit the possibility of independently obtaining extracts from the USRN. Opora proposes to postpone the innovation until the official launch of the state service, which allows checking the information contained in the extract from the USRN.

The Ministry of Digital Transformation and Rosreestre told Kommersant that they see no reason to postpone the entry into force of legislative changes.

Rosreestr added that the special service will be available from March 1. By this time, the law adopted last summer, which restricts access to information from the USRN, comes into force.

Now the data from the register will be available only with the consent of the owner of the housing. Exceptions are spouses, heirs, notaries, banks and cadastral engineers. The adoption of the bill by its developers argued with the strengthening of the protection of personal data. According to Rosreestr, more than 40% of participants in real estate transactions became victims of fraud at the stage of obtaining an extract from the USRN. The information obtained through the USRN is often used by scammers, confirms the CEO of Apple Real Estate Danila Savchenko.

However, Opora Rossii insists that after the amendments come into force, more than 500,000 small businesses and 120,000 self-employed people working in real estate will face serious problems.

Difficulties will arise for realtors, property owners, potential tenants and home buyers, explains Dmitry Gavrilenko, a member of the Presidium of Opora Rossii. According to him, now, when renting an apartment, a person can check that he is entering into an agreement with the owner by receiving an extract from the USRN.

According to Vasily Malinin, a partner at the law firm Rustam Kurmaev & Partners, an extract from the state register is the only document confirming the ownership of real estate. It will be more difficult for realtors to check the real owners of the object: extracts often need to be ordered several times – before making a deposit and the transaction itself, the expert explains.

Svetlana Krasnova, head of the legal service of Inkom-Nedvizhimost, fears that the new rule will lead to an increase in the number of unverified ads for the sale and rental of housing.

She doubts that citizens will have sufficient motivation to enter into transactions with a notarized extract from the USRN, as the new law suggests. An extract from the Unified State Register of Real Estate has been recognized by judicial practice as one of the criteria for recognizing a real estate buyer as bona fide, which allows the buyer to receive legal protection and count on compensation in the event of the object being withdrawn, says Ms. Krasnova.

Another potentially affected party from changes in legislation, Mr. Gavrilenko calls classifieds. Platforms use EGRN data to check objects and sometimes provide users with the opportunity to receive a truncated statement through them. CIAN declined to comment, Yandex.Real Estate did not answer Kommersant’s questions. Almaz Kuchembaev, head of the legal agency Kuchembaev & Partners, fears that limited access to extracts from the USRN will lead to an increase in the gray market for providing this information.

Dmitry Gavrilenko does not exclude that the service for checking statements being developed by the authorities will solve some of the problems. “But representatives of small businesses employed in real estate do not always have high digital literacy,” the expert notes. Initially, it was planned that in order to verify the information in the received statement, the owner would scan the QR code placed on it, which would lead him to a special website.

Alexandra Mertsalova, Diana Galieva