Translated material
It's nice to have a house in the village
The State Duma announced a dacha amnesty
At the end of last week, the State Duma adopted in the third and final reading a law simplifying the registration of dachas and land plots. It also equalized the rights to privatization of those on the waiting list, extending the period for free privatization until March 1, 2010.According to various estimates, from 20 to 50 million Russian families who own country houses, plots of land and garages that are not legally registered are awaiting the so-called dacha amnesty. According to Rosregistration, today no more than 50-60% of land plots and buildings are registered as property in the country. These are mainly cottages and plots of land purchased over the last decade.
Other country houses and plots of six acres belong to country or garden cooperatives. Such real estate cannot be sold, inherited, or used as collateral. Today, registering a plot or house as a property takes from a month to six months and, taking into account the expensive land surveying, costs from several hundred dollars to a couple of thousand.
The law introduces the declarative principle of legalization of buildings. If the document in its current form is adopted by the Federation Council and signed by the president, for a dacha or garage it will be enough to fill out a declaration and provide a detailed description of the structure. And then, based on the application, obtain ownership rights without involving the BTI. State registration of plots will cost 100 rubles.
It’s more difficult with land surveying prices. According to the law, tariffs for land surveying (within 3 thousand rubles) will be set by regional authorities. Therefore, citizens will not soon find out how much it will cost them to register a plot according to the new rules. Once the law comes into force, it will be possible to leave a dacha cooperative without collecting the signatures of all its members. It will also be possible to take ownership of the adjacent ownerless plot if the former owners do not lay claim to it.
According to the head of the State Duma Committee on Civil, Criminal, Arbitration and Procedural Legislation, Pavel Krasheninnikov, the main idea of the document was the recognition by the state of private property, which does not depend on the time of issuance of documents and authorities that granted the right to use the land. Such lands may include “a Soviet collective farm, a village council, a trade union, or Russian local authorities,” Mr. Krasheninnikov emphasized. Recognition of property rights, according to the deputy, is possible even on the basis of an extract from business books, which “have been kept in rural areas since the time of the October Revolution.”
Deputies also extended the deadline for the privatization of municipal housing until March 1, 2010. By an amazing coincidence, this happened the day after the Constitutional Court allowed the privatization of social housing to citizens who received it after March 1, 2005, when the new Housing Code came into force. (The Vremya Novostei newspaper wrote about this in detail on June 16.) Considering that state registration authorities cannot cope with the surge of people wishing to register ownership of apartments and the fact that there are about 4 million Russians in line to receive housing, the State Duma tried to equalize them with those who were lucky enough to become apartment owners earlier. The law on extending the privatization period should come into force on September 1, 2006 - after approval by the Federation Council and signing by the president.