A NUMBER of government offices in Paphos are still short staffed despite assurances from the state that these problems would be resolved.
A lack of staff in both the town planning department and the Land Registry offices in particular has meant that the public have been subject to continuing delays and long queues.
According to local MP Fidias Sarikas, considerable pressure to improve staffing levels was put on the relevant government departments by Paphos authorities months ago, but little has changed.
He said that although the town planning department received a few new staff, the Land Registry were given none.
The MP added there are long queues at the Land Registry department every day.
“This is not just caused by bureaucracy and red tape, but also by a severe shortage of staff,” he said, adding that the number of new employees at town planning was still insufficient to make any real difference
Sarikas added that he will meet with the district manager of the Land Registry to discuss the matter and try to come up with a solution.
In the meantime, Nicolas Lemonaris, on behalf of the Association of Estate Agents, said Paphos was being discriminated against.
“Other towns are afforded a better service provided to them from the Land Registry department,” he said, calling on the general public and local officials to react in a ‘dynamic way’ to get results.
Dinos Demitriou is a 34-year-old professional working within the construction industry in Paphos. He said that regular weekly and sometimes daily visits to the town planning department and the land registry offices are required as part of his job. He describes them as “hell on earth”.
“The staff do their best but they are just overwhelmed,” he said. “The only way to get anything done is to go to the offices really early, but even then there are generally people waiting, especially at the Land Registry.
“The government really must do something to change the situation. Procedures take far too long to follow, and staff are at breaking point.”
Those who have never been to any of the offices connected with buying a property might be interested to know what these places are like. In Paphos you walk past the imposing new law courts with the young ladies looking very elegant in their white blouses and high heels and round to the back of the building to Town Planning. Most of the offices there are not much bigger than a domestic toilet and are full of paper files so not much room to work or hold meetings but the staff do work and they do their best to be helpful.
Assuming Town Planning has confirmed that your development has planning permission, you may subsequently want to visit the District Land office to check whether your developer has, in fact, applied for a Certificate of Final Approval.
A short walk into Paphos Old Town brings you to the District office. The buildings would not be approved to house pigs in the rest of the EU. They are not a pretty sight. The workers, once again, are something else. They are friendly and helpful, they work into their lunch time if you have not been attended to and they try hard to make up for the deficiencies of the system they have to operate. There are very few computers there; almost everything is in handwritten books, like in the banks in the UK when I was a little boy in the 1950’s. They are not to blame for the mess that is the Cyprus property system. If you want to blame someone for the chaos, look for the creators of this bureaucratic nightmare.
The government promise the title deed problem will be sorted but seem very slow to implement the change needed.
This is holding up any further development and customers needed to buy property.
Aah… Peter & Andrew, you are making the mistake of using logic on Fred Karno’s Island.
The system is designed to frustrate property owners to the point where they let the nice lawyers and developers charge them even more to dispose of their properties to a nice fat Cypriot relative, at a loss of course.
They don`t actually want you to have Title Deeds. So why bother employing more staff?
The whole system is designed to baffle, confuse and deny rights to property ownership. So it would be unfair to be angry with the few poor hapless individuals who have to face the public on a daily basis.
A solution is simple if they want to find one.
Strange my brother has just bought a house in England and got the title deeds the same day. Although he was actually handed a paper copy he was told that he didn’t need them as they are all computerised.
So how long would it take to computerise the small half Island of Southern Cyprus? Ho, only about 40 years.
And they want to open up a University??
Hahaha
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.