Lag in property registration facilitates real estate fraud and identity theft, warns Sedatu

Fernando Camacho Servin

Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday June 5, 2022, p. 4

Crimes such as real estate fraud and identity theft are very recurrent in Mexico due to the lack of modern property registration and cadastre systems, which also hinders the proper collection of property taxes, whose collection in the country is less than 50 percent of what it should really be.

This was stated by Griselda Martínez, general director of Registries and Cadastres of the Secretariat of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development (Sedatu), who pointed out that the current government launched a registry modernization project for more than 79 million pesos in the entities where there is a greater lag.

In interview with the daythe official commented that land use planning is a task that relies heavily on registry and cadastral information, but Unfortunately, throughout history we have been a country that does not have a patrimonial culture. This leads to information being outdated in many cases and that creates a risk, even for public property..

One of the consequences of this lag, warned Martínez, is the commission of crimes such as real estate fraud, where One day you are the owner and the next day you are not.in addition to the usurpation of identity and granting of false deeds.

In the absence of security and legal certainty, not only is investment in the real estate sector harmed, but also people who, with great effort, manage to acquire a property. Uncertainty is generated about who you buy from, who you rent from, who you are negotiating with. The consequences can be extremely serious..

Although there are some entities where significant progress has been made in this area –such as Coahuila and Querétaro–, there are still many others where the delay is considerable, because the records continue to be made in books that can be lost or damaged, instead of being digitized. . This is the case of Chiapas, Nayarit, Oaxaca, Tabasco and Quintana Roo, among other states.

To reduce the lag, Martínez indicated, Sedatu will invest in 2022 a total of 79 million 830 thousand pesos in the modernization of property registries and cadastres, while in 2021 it allocated 76.9 million for this purpose; in 2020, 96.1 million, and in 2019, 98.5 million.

A second consequence of the lack of adequate records is the obstacle for the collection of taxes such as property taxes and the payment on the acquisition of real estate. In the first case, according to a study by the Ministry of Finance, less than 50 percent of what should be obtained is obtained, which particularly affects municipal governments and prevents them from improving their urban services.

That’s where municipalities survive. They have their source of income right there: you just have to work on it, update it and make strategies to improve collection.