Draft law: land under apartment blocks easier to hand to residents, a new one-year deadline and no surveyor's report

Plenty of people in Macedonia live in a flat that is theirs, in a building that stands on land that isn't. Now the state, at least on paper, is offering another chance to sort that out. Amendments to the Law on Privatisation and Lease of State-Owned Construction Land passed their first filter in Parliament yesterday, in the Committee on Financing and Budget.

The most important change for ordinary people: owners of flats in a building will be able to privatise the land under it on the basis of Cadastre data, without a mandatory surveyor's report to form a building plot. Anyone who has ever waited for a surveyor, paid for a report and then been sent back from the counter knows what one item fewer on the document list means.

The deadline for converting the right of use into a right of ownership is also being reopened. One year - but not from today, from the day the law enters into force, if it is adopted at all. That matters especially for former owners of undeveloped construction land who have not yet filed a request. The law also warns that this does not mean everyone using state land automatically becomes its owner.

The director of the Property and Legal Affairs Administration, Zoran Krstanoski, listed five changes for MPs. The provisions on long-term and temporary lease of state construction land are being scrapped, which he said had proved unworkable and created legal inequality, so the law will be called simply the Law on Privatisation of State-Owned Construction Land. It spells out who is entitled to privatisation, including heirs. It regulates plots with several buildings belonging to different owners, where the land can be privatised in co-ownership. A request already filed can be extended to other cadastral plots within the same building plot. And the Cadastre will have two years to delete certain old right-of-use entries.

All of this sounds reasonable, and that is exactly why the question arises: why did it take so long? If the existing rules caused "difficulties in procedure", as the Administration itself admits, how many requests got stuck in the meantime, and how many people paid for surveyor's reports they now don't need? The law has not been adopted yet. Until then, many will go on living in their own flat on state land.