Do you know where your title deeds are held? There is no need to go hunting out of idle curiosity, but there are times when it is useful to know what your title says:

• Before you market your property (not after an offer is accepted)
• Before building an extension, replacing a fence or altering access  
• When adding or removing someone from the title  
• When acting as an executor and establishing what the deceased owned
• When a neighbour raises a boundary or access question

That last one carries a warning. A copy of a deed and the understanding of what it says are two different things. Titles carry rights and obligations that may not be obvious on a first reading, and boundaries in particular are rarely as clear cut as people assume, as we covered in our article on boundary disputes and rights of access.

Two registers, one country

Scotland has two property registers, and your home likely sits in one of them.

1. The General Register of Sasines

Established in 1617, the Sasine Register is the oldest national public land register in the world. It is a register of deeds rather than of properties. Each property has a search sheet listing everything recorded against it over the years: dispositions, standard securities, discharges, deeds of conditions and the rest. There is no map, and the extent of the property is described in words, some of them handwritten a very long time ago.

If your title is still in the Sasine Register, the individual paper deeds do still matter, and they will be somewhere. Most often they are with the solicitor who acted on the last purchase. Sometimes a lender holds them, although far fewer keep paper deeds than once did. Occasionally they really are at home, in a bank deposit box, or with an executor who does not know what they are looking at.

2. The Land Register of Scotland

The Land Register of Scotland opened in 1981 and was rolled out county by county, reaching East Lothian on 1 October 1999. It is map based. Instead of a pile of separate deeds, each property has a single title sheet with its own number (East Lothian titles begin ELN). The sheet comes with a coloured plan drawn on the Ordnance Survey map and sets out the property, the owner, any securities and the burdens in one place. For more detail, our earlier article on the
examination of title looks at what a title sheet contains.

If your title is in the Land Register, the title sheet is your title. There is nothing more to find. Registers of Scotland stopped issuing paper land certificates on 8 December 2014, and the register is now the definitive record. An old land certificate in a drawer is a historical curiosity rather than a working document.

The Land Register is steadily replacing the Sasine Register. Every transfer of ownership of a Sasine title triggers registration onto the Land Register. Also, since 1 April 2016 the Sasine Register closed to new Standard Securities. That means, should you re-mortgage your home and when your title is recorded in the Sasine Register, the new standard security pushes the title across into the Land Register. More than 2.2 million properties are now registered, roughly 88 per cent of the homes that come to market with any regularity.

If the deeds you want are very old, Registers of Scotland, who also maintain the Land Register, holds Sasine deeds from 1869. Anything earlier sits with the National Records of Scotland.

How to get a copy

Before you spend anything, contact the solicitor who acted for you when you bought the property. If they still hold your papers, they can usually tell you what you have in a couple of minutes. Or they may be able to get a copy of the title for you.

If you wish to find your title deeds without assistance, start with a free search on ScotLIS, the land information service run by Registers of Scotland. Enter the postcode and you can see whether the property is on the Land Register, view the boundary on a map and check recent sale prices, all for free.

If the property is registered, you can also request a copy of the title sheet and title plan for a nominal fee.

If the property is still in the Sasine Register, the search is done by hand. The Registers of Scotland can produce the search sheet, for a cost. From there you can order the individual deeds you need, whether plain or an extract for court purposes. Copies arrive as PDFs by email.

What if they cannot be found at all?

If the title is on the Land Register, lost paperwork is not worth losing sleep over. The register holds everything that matters.

If the title is in the Sasine Register and the deeds have gone astray, the position is recoverable but less comfortable. Registers of Scotland holds record copies, and the title can usually be rebuilt from the search sheet. That takes time and money, and the worst moment to discover the problem is the week you accept an offer. Voluntary registration is then worth a conversation: it moves the title into the Land Register and makes any future sale more straightforward.

How Paris Steele can help

Paris Steele has dealt with titles, including the handwritten ones, in both registers across East Lothian and beyond for a very long time. If you are not sure where your deeds are, or you would like someone to help you with what your title actually says, speak to our Residential Property team. Call North Berwick on 01620 892138 or Dunbar on 01368 862746, or contact us through the website.