3.1. THE EVOLUTION OF LAND REGISTRATION
From the middle of the 19th Century the real estates were double registered in Hungary. On one hand, there were land registers, whose commencement was based on a decree on the juridical reconnaissance issued on 18th April 1853. The factual introduction of the land registers , however, was ordered by the Statute XXIXth, 1886, which the negotiable and mortgaged real estate i. e. the entity which can be entered into legal transactions was involved in. The land registers were aiming at the security of the ownership, the unperturbedness of the land transactions as well as the creditors' interests.
On the other hand, land tax cadastre took place, too, by an imperial edict issued on 4th March 1850, but its institutional structure was built up for Hungary on the basis of the Statute VIIth, 1875. The land tax cadastre can be regarded as a kind of cadastre of avails while all real estates belong to it. The cadastre was created for the purposes of the state and politics, within those for taxation. The difference between the land registers and land tax cadastre can be recognized by the diverging structure and authorization, since the land registers were within juridical scope, while the land tax cadastre was a part of the public administration so it had special offices and administrative ways.
The cadastral map served as common basis both for the land registers and for the land tax cadastre. Between 1850 and the 1st World War, the cadastral scales were 1:1440 and 1:2880, respectively, but from the late 1920s on decimal and metric scales were applied in the new surveys. The land registers and the land tax cadastre were parallelly used and mutual data exchange took place between them. After some time this fact resulted in double data registration, but the data stemming from other sources were not really authentic in the home files, and this fact caused a lot of incertainty in the use. These circumstances led to the decision of 1971, saying, that keeping records parallelly is not expedient and authentic but uniform registration has to be established - including all the data concerning the legal status of the real estates.
The first step was the merger of the land registers with the cadastre on 1st January 1972. The second step was to regulate the form and essence of the new unified real estate registration.

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