The European Land Information Service (EULIS) provides access to land and property information across Europe to meet the needs of professional users - lenders, conveyancers and other professional groups.
EULIS is a live service officially launched in November 2006 at the Annual EMF (European Mortgage Federation) conference in Brussels.
EULIS was originally owned and governed by a consortium of eight organisations, each responsible for land and property information in its own country:England and Wales (Land Registry), Ireland (Property Registration Authority), Lithuania (Registru Centras), Netherlands (Kadaster), Sweden (Lantmteriet), Austria (Bundesministerium fur Justiz), Finland (Maanmittauslaitos), Scotland (Registers of Scotland).
Since March 2011 EULIS is owned and governed by a European Economic Interest Group (EEIG) with members from different member countries, each responsible for land and property information in its own country.
The initiative started by recognition of:
- Increasing number of EU citizens buying second homes in other countries.
- Real property industry becoming more and more international.
- Lack of knowledge about information from other countries.
- Secured lending presently confined mainly within national boundaries.
The portal is responsible for services related to distribution of accounting-data and the process of logging the users into the different systems. The goal is to enable the customer to buy land register information anywhere in the network, and only get one invoice from their distributor.
At this moment, there are 21 member countries (not all EU-member countries). For more info see www.eulis.eu
The overall aim of EULIS still remains to provide easy worldwide access to European land and property information in order to underpin a single European property market, but recently there is increasingly more demand for information in the Justice arena, hence being chosen as the solution for the European e-Justice portal.
EULIS is the first call for European land and property information in a growing number of cross border transactions, thus having the information immediately on-line and in English and therefore being able to advise the applicant much quicker and better.
The technical infrastructure of EULIS facilitates the goal of giving users seamless access to land register information across borders, if they have the right agreement with their local land register for online access.
Another goal is that a customer will be billed from the entity holding the agreement, and the other suppliers will accept remote users and transfer accounting information between them to provide the services for all customers in the EULIS network.
The EULIS portal is responsible for services related to distribution of accounting-data and the process of logging the users into the different systems. The goal is to enable the customer to buy land register information anywhere in the network, and only get one invoice from their distributor.
The directives for building EULIS 2.0 (2010-2012) were that Open Source Software (OSS) systems, services and tools are preferable. The system should operate at low cost and in conjunction of “Green” agenda to ensure low carbon footprint.
Furthermore we aimed to use common international standards as far as possible e.g. SOAP 1.1, UTF-8 (encoding), http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema (XML).
We have established partnerships with e-Justice, ELRA, EG, PCC and CLGE . We have signed a common vision agreement with ELRA, EG, PCC and CLGE and thus sustain a viable organization and are able to share our knowledge and experiences.
Businesses and citizens (by means of a mediator like real estate agent) have easier and much quicker access to land and property information. This reduces a lot of administrative burden and gives more satisfaction and creates opportunities and time savings. As waiting times are reduced from days to seconds and quality is high (national standards) this leads to an increased perceived quality of public services and a higher overall user satisfaction and increases the pan-European trust in Land Registries.
Since EULIS 2.0 the service can also be used by citizens for some simple, free of charge inquires as well as the Reference Information will give them all information about the procedures in Land Registry and Cadastres in foreign countries.
The number of users is almost unlimited as all users of all mentioned groups in all connected countries are professional users and thus have a single sign-on access to EULIS.
Besides the possibility for users to directly send any kind of questions to various individuals, or to the aforementioned customer service, the user can visit a specific part on the web site called “Reference Information”. Next to the Reference Information a multilingual glossary is available to help users understand the meaning of the most common terms in different languages.
Both the Reference information as the multilingual glossary, are also available for all citizens.
The EULIS service is integrated and working in: Ireland (Property Registration Authority), Lithuania (Valstybės įmonė Registrų centras - State Enterprise Centre of Registers), Netherlands (Kadaster), Austria (Bundesministerium für Justiz) and Spain (Colegio de Registradores de la Propiedad, Mercantiles y de Bienes Muebles de España).
EULIS-EEIG (EULIS became EEIG in 2011), fully supports the LRI project.
The LRI project (started February 2016) aims to reuse as much of EULIS as possible (architecture, technical solutions, web services, etc). EULIS-EEIG will hand over all needed documentation, programs, web services as well as invest in this project by sending persons with in-depth knowledge of the present EULIS. In the near future EULIS will be rebuilt in the e-Justice portal (at this moment it is expected around end 2017) as the present infrastructure can be used to exchange style sheets and deeds in cross border transactions and information enquiries.
As the goal of EULIS always was to connect as many European countries as possible, this LRI project will encourage more countries to connect and thus is in line with the EULIS's vision.