LADM patterns to support the efficient modelling of Cooperative (Community and Strata) Titles
Channel: Ant Beck
Date: 2022-03-24

In many jurisdictions sub-ownership rights can be separated from the main body of ownership.
In Scotland these are referred to as _separate tenements_ and encompass such ownership rights as minerals, salmon fishing, mines of gold and silver, and petroleum cite:[reid1996(168-171)].
The main body of ownership may be further encumbered with ancillary rights (such as access) to ensure that holders of sub-ownership rights can effectively enjoy the right they hold.
However, these further encumbrances are, in general, not seen as excessively onerous by owners of the main body of ownership.
Separated ownership rights, as thus described, have been successfully used in a number of jurisdictions for centuries.

Strata (airspace subdivided by reference to structures built in that air) is another form of separated ownership used to define flats in a flatted (shared) building.
Ownership within shared buildings requires the division of a building into individually owned property (strata (airspace)) and collectively owned (shared) common property, governed by a set of rules.
Owners of flats have interdependent community cooperative rights relationships with other members of the flatted building.
These relationships are significantly more complex and onerous than rights required to support other separate tenements (as described above).


Similar ownership relationships can be modelled where there is no flatted building, but there are facilities, for example common landscaped areas, that are shared between owners.
Hence, a distinction can be made between vertical and horizontal subdivision.
The term 'strata title' can be used for vertical subdivisions representing apartment buildings.
The term 'community title' can be used for horizontal subdivisions representing planned communities cite:[sherry_strata_2016(4)].
In this paper we refer collectively to horizontal and vertical ownership as `cooperative ownership`.
While 'cooperative ownership' can represent different forms of ownership types, they have relationships with shared property (lifts, stairwells, halls, car park, roof and surrounding land) that usually require maintenance.

Where orthodox property law is not adequate for describing community ownership these jurisdictions have created additional property law to allow such community titles.
Such laws provide rules outlining how separate owners should be granted rights over shared property.
Critically, such laws tend to involve the establishment of a corporate body (housing associations, or their equivalents) with powers to create 'positive obligations' cite:[sherry_strata_2016(9-15)].
Praedial covenants, which bind all subsequent owners to the conditions of a contract, are used to express these 'positive obligations' which allow the corporate body to levy and administer the necessary fees and funds.
In this manner maintenance costs for the entire building or complex can be imposed on successive owners.

The Land Administration Domain Model (LADM cite:[iso_tc211_iso_2012]) is a conceptual model which supports the modelling of social relations with land articulated through _rights_.
There are three principal concepts within LADM: the party (_the who_) that has a rights relationship (_the what_) with a plot of land (_the where_).
Community ownership titling introduces a range of specialised patterns within LADM as described by citenp:[sherry_strata_2016] and citenp:[van_der_merwe_comparative_2002], including:

* Shared praedial ownership of common areas,
* Praedial inheritance - the chaining of praedial ownership,
* The ability of corporate bodies to restrict rights across the community.
** Potentially establishing a localised fiefdom where reserved rights have an _in rem_ effect and are 'good against the world'.

This paper will introduce these topics, and introduce registration patterns based on top-level party-right-land primitives.
Exemplars are provided in the paper supported by a live presentation which simulates an automated registration process.