Registration: Let’s talk Sasine 

We get it - when buying or remortgaging a Property you won’t expect to be told that the Property is not registered in our Land Register of Scotland. The news can come as quite a shock for some. 

For properties not yet registered in our Land Register, it’s likely that they will still be registered in our historic Sasine (pronounced say-zeen) Register. The sale or remortgage of these properties will trigger the registration from the Sasine Register to the Land Register. 

This Sasine Register is “old school”. It is paper based, and it recorded legal documents to buy, sell, remortgage or lease land etc. These legal deeds were often hand-written on scrolls, and the physical documents were transferred over the decades and centuries between owners, solicitors and lenders whenever a property or land was sold or remortgaged. 

It was widely recognised that the system was no longer compatible with the fast-paced modern legal environment. This resulted in the introduction of the Land Register of Scotland - see our article “Registration: The Land Register of Scotland” for more on this. 

If you are buying or remortgaging a Property that is still recorded in the Sasine Register, additional work is required by your solicitor as part of the legal process so that they can make an application to the Registers of Scotland to successfully register your Property in the Land Register after settlement of your transaction. 

The work required by solicitors to ensure the successful registration of the Property is often really complex, and time-consuming. It will almost certainly cause a delay to the settlement of your transaction which we understand can be frustrating. However, the importance of successfully registering a Property in the Land Register cannot be underestimated - once the Property is Land Registered, that is it. No more talk of Sasine. 

If you are interested to know whether your Property is still registered in the Sasine Register, please let us know and we will conduct a search on your behalf.