Reforms in land titling in Calamba lauded

CALAMBA City—A group of bankers lauded the recent “changes and reforms” implemented at a land titling office here, as the banking sector links up with the Land Registration Authority (LRA) to ensure a smoother economic activity in the country.

These reforms include the 24-hour processing and release of the certified copies of the titles, a faster system of registration of real estate mortgages, a flexible and “no cut-off” time to transact business, and screening of the requirements upon submission to the register of deeds (RD) to ease delays and prevent fraudulent transactions.

“The registration of loans and mortgages used to take 20 days, then down to 14 days (with the computerized system), and now to just about 7 to 8 days,” said Oscar Gumabay, first vice president for the credit appraisal and investigation department of the Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. (RCBC).

Gumabay also heads the technical working group of the Bankers’ Association of the Philippines (BAP), representing the largest stakeholder of the LRA.

In a proposed partnership between the BAP and the LRA for the creation of a Central Access Point that will facilitate the credit information exchange between the two, Gumabay cited the Calamba City RD as a “model” to the land titling offices for implementing “proactive measures and customer service.”

The reforms at the Calamba RD came following a series of memoranda issued by its head, lawyer Joven Alegre, from September 8-14.

The memoranda tackled office protocol and filing system, the “one-day-per-desk” processing, title transfer, and transactions with financial institutions.

Calamba RD deputy head Jose Roy Raval said most transactions passed through an average of eight desks, with the “bottleneck” at the “encoding” stage as this requires an employee to manually type in the documents’ details on the computer.

“We only have four encoders (at present) when in fact we needed around 12 or more and four scanners (used for the uploading of the files to the computerized system) when we need around eight,” he said.

The Calamba RD, as of March, is the largest branch nationwide, catering to an average of 331 transactions daily. Since the computerized system was implemented last year, 66 percent of the “thousands” of files from as far back as 1946 have been uploaded to the new system, he said.

Raval said another measure is creating an “express lane” system that will separate corporate transactions from individual titleholders.

Under this system, single transactions will be attended to immediately since an employee will be designated to handle only these type of transactions.

The reforms at the Calamba RD were prompted by complaints of delays in land title processing by some land developers in August.

Raval said despite the shortage in facilities and staff, the new policies had cut an average transaction from a month to ten days.