Development agency Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) has appointed an Edinburgh law firm to help record 150 of its properties in the new Land Register of Scotland (LRS)
Morton Fraser was selected by HIE to carry out the work over the next two years following a tendering process.
The LRS is an Ordnance Survey map-based public register of interests in land throughout Scotland. Public bodies have been told by the Scottish Government to register all their heritable assets by December 2019 to complete the project.
Morton Fraser partner Amy Entwistle, who is leading the project, said: “With the commitment to all public land being land registered by the end of 2019, it is an important and time sensitive project, which allows our team to play a role in facilitating more transparent public access to land ownership information.”
Around 37 HIE titles are already entered in the land register. The remaining 150 are recorded in the General Register of Sasines.
HIE’s commercial property portfolio comprises 79 individual industrial units and 41 offices, 90 development plots, a further 12 plots on ground leases to businesses and 15 miscellaneous properties, including Cairngorm Estate, the Centre for Health Sciences and the agency’s An Lòchran headquarters in Inverness.
HIE solicitor Keir Marshall said: “A completed Land Register will be a national asset, providing clear and unambiguous knowledge of who owns land in Scotland and HIE is very pleased to be contributing to its completion.
“Morton Fraser has a strong history with this type of project and we have confidence in the team’s ability to help us register our diverse landholding, which ranges from whole estates on Skye and in the Cairngorms to modern business premises and enterprise parks such as Inverness Campus, Arnish Stornoway and the European Marine Science Park, Argyll”.
