The results are in

End of year registration results

There has been a welcome return to growth in the 2013-14 property market, which is being mirrored in our registration intakes. The volume of applications received is up by around 8% compared with the previous year, and our overall intakes for the financial year ending on 31 March stood at some 383,000 applications for recording and/or registration. We despatched around 406,000 applications during the year.

The 2013-14 financial year has been the first time in three decades of land registration that we have set and delivered to a timeframe for the processing of all application types. Our performance against the new service standards for completion of applications, introduced last April (and October for transfers of part), has been high; some registration products have had 100% compliance and overall we sit at 99.59%. This has provided our customers with a very clear and accurate picture of the maximum time we will take to process an application.

Service standards set a backstop for the time we will take to complete an application, but the actual processing time can be much faster. In 2013-14 we:

• completed 50% of all applications within five days and 85% within 30 days;
• dealt with 60% of dealings with whole (our most frequent product) within two days;
• completed 74% of standard first registrations in under 20 days; and
• processed Sasine deeds in an average of 6.46 days.

Our stocks of work are reducing and we now have just under 40,000 applications awaiting completion. To put this in perspective, we had some 160,000 applications awaiting completion at the end of March 2010.

For a full breakdown of our service standards compliance figures, download the Service Standards PDF

Annual customer survey results 2013-14

Historically, the annual customer survey findings have highlighted that RoS customers are satisfied with the specific products and services that they use, and this remains the case for the 2013-14 findings. There has also been an overall pattern of improvement on specific services across the three dimensions of speed of response, accuracy, and helpfulness of staff.

The main instances where there was a more marked variation between the 2012-13 and 2013-14 results were all recorded on the “speed of response” survey measure. In three of these instances the change was a noted improvement: for pre-registration service there was an 11 percentage point increase in those rating speed of response as “very good or fairly good” (from 68% to 79%); for transfers of part, speed of response continues to improve, with an increase in 10 points in those rating it as “very good or fairly good”; and for first registrations there was a 13 percentage point increase in those awarding a “very good or fairly good” rating for speed of response.

Our property reports service “helpfulness” and “accuracy” scores have also improved, as have our system response times for Registers Direct, e-forms and ARTL. The customer satisfaction overall index recorded for RoS in the survey was 72, which remained consistent with the early 2013 survey.

Head of Commercial Services, Rhona MacKay, commented: “The RoS annual customer survey provides us with an up-to-date opinion of how the organisation is performing for our stakeholders by evaluating our services and product offering. We issued 10,000 email invitations to customers from a variety of different organisations, and I would like to thank all those who completed the online survey.

“While we are delighted with the scores we received, as a customer-focused organisation we strive to continuously improve our services, and the survey results have provided us with some key analysis and insight to improve our score.”

Service standards update

In 2013-14 we:

Completed 50% of all applications within five days and 85% within 30 days
Dealt with 60% of dealings with whole (our most frequent product) within two days
Completed 74% of standard first registrations in under 20 days
Processed sasine deeds in an average of 6.46 days