The earth is called to order – Newspaper Kommersant No. 185 (7386) dated 10/06/2022

Rosreestr has prepared two bills on regulating the use of land and facilities built on them, including individual housing construction. The new norms should encourage citizens to cadastral registration of private houses: if you avoid it on land leased from the state for more than 10 years, real estate can be sold at auction. The agency also intends to expand sanctions for non-use and improper use of any land: so far, responsibility for this has been determined only for farmland. Business talks about the need to soften and simplify legislation – however, Rosreestr needs to fill the cadastre with data: many economic programs and plans are tied to it.

Rosreestr published on regulation.gov.ru amendments “to certain legislative acts of the Russian Federation” and to the Code of Administrative Offenses, aimed at restoring order in several areas of land relations at once: this is cadastral registration of individual housing construction (IZHS) and control over the compliance of the use of land plots and those built on of them objects to the types of permitted use. Large-scale work is related to the new state program “National System of Spatial Data”, which should become the basis for state programs and projects in the economy.

One of the most socially sensitive ideas of the department is to force citizens to cadastral registration of individual housing construction objects – through the introduction into the Urban Planning Code of the rule that lease agreements for plots of state land under such houses that have not been registered for a 10-year period will be broken, and the buildings themselves – be sold at auction. The service insists that the initiative is needed for state registration. Such an obligation is already provided for in the Town Planning Code, but in reality “on the territory of each constituent entity of the Russian Federation there are from 1,000 to 5,000 residential buildings that are used by citizens without registration of rights.” It should be noted that the first consequence of the activation of cadastral registration of individual housing construction will be the growth of the tax base – the real estate tax replenishes regional budgets. At the same time, in the Russian Federation in recent years there has been a boom in individual housing construction, the sector has grown at a rate of 50–80%, and in June a preferential mortgage was launched for it.

For land owners, Rosreestr intends to introduce into the legislation the obligation to use buildings and structures on them “in accordance with the type of permitted use established for the plots.” Now the issue has not been resolved, experts have repeatedly spoken out in favor of the need to remove the confusion in the concepts of “appointment” and “use” of land, but the service insists on bringing the current structure into working condition. To do this, the land supervision authorities will receive the authority to control the use of sites and the right to revoke a building permit in case of violations. In particular, for this purpose it is proposed to give a unified definition of the concept of “land plot development” and describe the activities that relate to it; the government will also have to determine the signs of non-use of land. Now such a norm exists only for agricultural plots, while amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses should extend sanctions for this to all plots.

“The bill gives the citizen time to develop the land and establishes the appropriate deadlines, only after the expiration of which the control and supervisory authorities can deal with the issues of holding the land user liable,” says Secretary of State, Deputy Head of Rosreestr Alexei Butovetsky. Officials explain the innovations by protecting the property interests of citizens (see Kommersant-Online), including the impossibility of transferring an “unfinished” IZHS by inheritance or including it in gasification programs. However, for entrepreneurs, the task of bringing the permitted types of land use in line with reality will necessitate compliance with new formalities. As Kommersant was told in the service, in particular, it will be necessary to “take measures to enter updated data into the USRN” (see Kommersant-Online).

It should be noted, however, that the Rosreestr project introduces new mandatory requirements for business, and market participants hope to “smooth out” its norms during discussions in the relevant working group of the White House subcommittee on control and supervisory activities. In the meantime, as Elena Nikolaeva, president of the National Agency for Low-rise and Cottage Construction, notes, “this is rather forward rule-making.” If such rules are introduced, Ms. Nikolaeva emphasizes, a “significant delay in the confiscation rules” is needed. At the same time, the expert believes, the draft law needs to be finalized – it must be supplemented with a radical simplification of the procedure for registering rights to erected objects.

Oleg Sapozhkov, Diana Galieva, Evgenia Kryuchkova