CROSS-LEASE UPDATE

After or during the construction phase, the house is measured for the New Cross-lease plan.

The process is as follows:

• Spacelink Surveyors measured up the new building and existing neighbouring buildings on the same Cross-lease.
• We put the new building outline on the new Cross-lease plan.
• We compile the application for Auckland Council approval
• Provided the building has the Code Compliance Certificate, it is easy enough to the council to sign-off the digital certificate on the plan sitting in the surveyor’s LINZ database.
• Spacelink Surveyors then lodges all information to LINZ and subsequently the client’s solicitor.
• A new Cross-lease Title is then approved by the LINZ legal team.

Cross-leases

are a throw-back to the 1970’s mainly originating in Auckland as a way of avoiding paying Council development contribution and to keep costs down to split the land up.

Now there are over 100,000 cross-lease titles in Auckland alone, as initially everyone flocked to this form of land development ( rightly or wrongly).

The main feature of a Cross-lease is that the underlying land of the whole block is owned in common, and the area of the house is leased for a long time ( 999 years).

There are a raft of problems, because there is joint ownership, and alterations require neighbour’s consent.

These days council has tidied up all loop holes that gave cross-leases the right to pay less council development fees. So there is now no point to creating a new Cross-lease.