Reputable = Smooth Transaction?

Once upon a time, a buyer was purchasing a parcel of land in the province from a reputable company.

The buyer assumed that the purchase was a straightforward, above-board process since the seller was a publicly listed firm.

In completing the sale, the buyer requested certified copies of the title from the office of the Registry of Deeds (RD) closest to him. After a week of waiting, the RD got back and said that there were "no records" of the title in their system. The RD office said to check with the RD provincial office that issued the title.

The buyer reassured himself that the seller wouldn't cheat anyone. Nevertheless, he became nervous about the issue since he had already paid a deposit to the seller.

The buyer drove all the way to the province and requested certified copies of the title. To the buyer's surprise, the issuing office also couldn't find digital copies of the title in their system.

The buyer quickly called the seller to report that the RD couldn't produce certified copies of the title. The seller reassured the buyer that they were holding on to their copies of the title, and the problem was with the RD.

After going back and forth to the RD's office, the RD concluded that their copy of the titles was missing. Thus, the RD required the seller to file a petition for the reconstitution of the title.

The end.

Lessons:

It isn't assurance that simply because the buyer was working with a reputable company, the transaction would go smoothly. Problems could still arise from the government's side.

In this story, the provincial Registry of Deeds (RD) lost its copy of the title. If you visit some of these underfunded provincial government offices, you'll understand why. They have rooms filled with thousands of stacked folders held together by a rubber band. It's likely (I'm not sure) that in the process of scanning each one, they've misplaced some of them.

The sad part about this story is that the sale couldn't push through because the seller needed to have the title reconstituted first. This process can easily take 1 to 2 years. Moreover, the newly minted title will have a section 7 annotation stating that the title was reconstituted. If you include the prescription period for the removal of this annotation, the process could take four years–with lawyers involved.

What could the seller do to prevent this from happening?

The seller could have converted their titles into e-titles. The LRA's drive to convert titles into e-titles is so that if the RD's copies of titles were lost [either through fire damage (Quezon City), typhoons (Leyte), or simply negligence], the RD could simply reprint them since they're stored in their servers.

Don't they have scanned copies already?

The process of scanning is different from converting titles into e-titles. Scanning merely produces digital images of the old title. Older titles can hardly be read. In the conversion to e-titles, the data contained in the title is typewritten again, and a new title with a new number is produced.