Picture the following scene. Someone buys a flat. The contract is signed, the purchase price is paid, the handover is done. Everyone involved is happy. Then, six months later, it turns out that the buyer is still not the owner. Because the land registry office still has not processed the application. Welcome to the world of E-ING.

What Is the Land Registry, and Why Does It Matter?

Before we get to the point, a minute of legal history, and I promise it will be painless. The Hungarian land registry has been with us since the early nineteenth century. Since the middle of that century, every property has had a kind of identity card, the title deed, which consists of three parts. The first part contains the property’s data, the second the owners. The third part holds the encumbrances: mortgages, usufruct, prohibitions on alienation, and similar pleasant things.

Why does this matter? Because in Hungary, as generally in continental Europe, any right relating to real estate, including ownership, does not come into being or pass with the signing of the contract, but with registration at the land registry. However fully you pay the purchase price, however surely you take the keys, as long as the seller’s name is on the title deed, they are legally the owner.

To acquire ownership, then, you need two things. First, a valid legal title, that is, some contract. Second, registration in the land registry. In other words, the land registry office has to delete the seller from the title deed and register the buyer as the owner for the transaction to succeed. The lesson: land registration is not a bureaucratic formality.

The Old System: Boring, But It Worked

Under the law in force since 1997, business at the land registry office was conducted on paper. True, the database itself had long been digitized, title deeds could be requested electronically, for example, but applications were submitted on paper, decisions arrived on paper, and the process ran on physical documents. The office had, then and now, 60 days to decide. In an expedited procedure, 30. This was not lightning fast, but at least it was predictable. Lawyers and their clients knew roughly when their cases would go through. There were minor hiccups in the system, but fundamentally it was fine.

The New Law: Beautiful on Paper

On 15 January 2025, the new land registration act came into force. With it, in principle, E-ING, the Electronic Land Registry system, was launched, or rather should have been.

The idea was noble. Everything would become electronic: submitting applications, processing them, delivering decisions. In certain simple cases, such as the sale of an unencumbered property, automatic decision-making would even have been possible, meaning ownership could have been registered right there in the lawyer’s office, immediately after the purchase price was paid. On top of that, the system would have been connected to the address register, the company register, and ten other state databases.

The promise was tempting: faster, cheaper, more transparent. Less paper, less queuing, less human error. The only small problem is that the system does not work.

The True Face of E-ING

The rollout was originally planned for 15 January 2024. Then it slipped to 1 October. Then to 15 January 2025. When it finally launched, even that had to be understood loosely, that the law came into force, but the electronic system itself was still not available to lawyers.

The transition then began in the summer of 2025 at the land registry offices. Area by area, step by step, the old system was switched off and E-ING switched on. By August across most of the country, by September in Budapest too. And here comes the crux.

The system does not work properly from the inside either. According to the land registry officials themselves, they can complete a case in three times as long as before. The program is slow, throws error messages, and crashes. What used to be three cases in a morning is now one.

From the outside, things are no better. For a long time, the only function available on the interface for lawyers was requesting the title deed. The registration functions appeared gradually, late, and incompletely. If the system cannot record a marginal note, it temporarily blocks the requesting of that property’s title deed, which can be a matter of a few hours, but also of days. On the day of an upcoming sale contract, this is a most pleasant experience.

Delivery is an adventure too. Decisions should arrive at the lawyer’s official electronic gateway. Often no notification comes. The only way to find out what happened to your case is to request the title deed again and again. This is not free: currently 4,800 forints a piece, plus the lawyer’s fee if I request it.

The result: waiting lists of weeks, even months, have formed. In the spring of 2026, the land registry offices are processing applications received in the autumn of 2025. That is roughly a five-month delay on top of the statutory 60-day deadline.

The 16-Billion-Forint Question

The question may arise: how could a system end up in such a state? According to press reports, the project was developed from 16 billion forints of EU funding, and the development grew more expensive and slipped over several rounds. The development phase formally concluded in 2023, so on paper the system was ready, and in March 2024 it was even reported to the EU as complete and paid for.

Since the system was handed over but does not actually work, in May 2025 a report was submitted to OLAF, the European Anti-Fraud Office, and investigations and freedom-of-information requests have been ongoing around the case ever since. A court decision was even handed down ordering the institution coordinating the development to release data. The logic of settling the accounts for a system, paying for it, and bringing it into force while the key functions do not work, let us politely call creative project management.

What Does This Mean for the Average Person?

Let’s get to the specifics, because all of this is not just lawyers’ headache.

If you buy property now, registering ownership may take anywhere from six months to a year. During that time, legally the seller is the owner, even though you live there and you paid the purchase price.

If you buy with a loan, the bank’s mortgage also has to be registered, and that too waits in the queue. Months can pass between the disbursement of the loan and the registration, in a status full of uncertainty.

If a small error slips into the paperwork, say a mistyped address or an incorrectly recorded tax number, the application is rejected. Then you can start over. The seller has to be tracked down again, the document signed again, the application submitted again. And of course the new application starts in the queue from its fresh arrival date. I will not even write about what happens if the seller cannot be reached, for example because they have emigrated and refuse to lift a finger.

If you buy a newly built flat where the whole condominium has not even been registered yet, and the developer submitted their application in November 2025, your purchase probably will not come up before the end of 2026. In such a case, even signing a preliminary contract is a serious risk: prices may change in the meantime, and the buyer cannot get in within a foreseeable time either.

All of this means that one of the basic institutions of the property market, the registration of ownership, is currently unpredictable and unreliable.

Why Isn’t This Just the Lawyers’ Problem?

People often say that lawyers always complain about electronic systems because they cling to paper. Personally, this is not at all true of me, I am happy to work with electronic solutions, if they actually work.

But in E-ING’s current state, the problem is not that it is electronic. The problem is that it does not work. A paper-based system that is slow is at least predictable. An electronic system that crashes, stalls, and causes months of delay is worse than the old solution it was meant to replace. Digitization is not an end in itself. It is not enough to make a system electronic, it also has to work.

What Happens Next?

According to government communication, the full build-out of E-ING will be completed in the first half of 2026. The functions for lawyers are appearing gradually, and the system only becomes mandatory from the third quarter of 2026. Until then, the paper-based procedure remains.

The promises and the schedule are known. Indeed, we know the original deadlines too: 15 January 2024, then 1 October, then 15 January 2025. Every one of them slipped, and each time a new deadline came, so let us be skeptical.

Advice While the System Is ‘Being Fine-Tuned’

If you are considering a property transaction right now, a few practical suggestions.

Ask your lawyer to track the status of the case. Unfortunately, there have already been examples where a marginal note was missed due to a system error. Under the current circumstances, handling a case requires active attention.

If possible, build flexible provisions on deadlines into the sale contract. In the current situation, it protects both parties’ interests if the contract does not set unrealistically short deadlines.

For a newly built flat, think especially carefully about when and on what terms you sign a preliminary contract. Registration can slip by as much as a year and a half to two years.

If you are taking out a loan, check with the bank what the process is and what to expect in the event of registration delays.

The land registry is one of the most important legal institutions of everyday life. Everyone is affected who buys, sells, inherits, or gifts property. The E-ING transition is not merely a technical question: legal certainty, ownership, and the enforceability of contracts depend on it.

In the meantime, remember that in the case of ownership, the person shown in the second part of the title deed is the owner. If you are the buyer, you will have to be quite patient these days.

If you have a real estate law question, or you are considering a property transaction soon, feel free to get in touch. Book a consultation, and I will be glad to help you navigate the current situation.