Published on the 25/09/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

$175m project nears completion…

Land Information New Zealand has ‘substantially’ completed the modernisation of New Zealand’s core land information system, Landonline, 12 years after the organisation started planning for the $175 million modernisation.

Landonline – or under its imaginatively titled new iteration, New Landonline – is New Zealand’s official system for managing land titles and survey data. It enables professionals such as surveyors, lawyers, conveyancers, the public, banks and councils to search, update and register property ownership and boundaries.

“The associated financial benefits are substantial with the improvements expected to have a flow-on effect in terms of improved economic value.”

Step (Survey and Title Enhancement Programme) saw the replacement of the legacy system built between 1998 and 2003, using PowerBuilder, with a ‘fit-for-purpose and future-proofed’ modular, cloud-based platform.

Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (Linz) reported in June that the legacy system had been replaced and the new system was in use by all 10,000 titles customers. The final survey application, Plan Generation – dubbed the final, and most complex, piece of survey functionality needed to enable a full transition – was released to surveyors at the end of July. By September, Linz says around 90 percent of Plan Generation usage was on the new functionality.

A prototype digital survey plan visualisation tool, which Linz has dubbed ‘groundbreaking’, replaces time-consuming manual plan drafting, which can require weeks of surveyor effort in complex subdivisions, with an automatically rendered digital plan which takes minutes to generate, Linz says. Once rendered the digital plans can be shared with other property system participants.

The tool requires changes to the Cadastral Survey Rules, which will be consulted on later this year.

Meanwhile, Legacy Landonline will be switched off next week, with Legacy Landonline truly becoming a legacy from 01 October, when New Landonline becomes Landonline.

The milestones mark ‘substantial’ completion of the modernisation platform and delivery of 90 percent of forecast benefits, with the transition to a smaller, business as usual, team underway earlier this year.

That team will be responsible for the remaining modernisation work, which includes internal backend functionality, including data base migration, staff facing tools and enhancements to internal systems, and is expected to be completed by December.

An independent assessment prepared for the STEP board says the program has already delivered most of its expected benefits and had identified some ‘high-value emergent benefits’.

“New Landonline is highly reliable, secure and available at extended hours. Landonline can now be accessed by modern internet browsers, system changes can be made quickly and the user interface is a notable improvement on Legacy.

“New Landonline is also delivering productivity improvements to Landonline users, Toitū Te Whenua and important third parties.”

The assessment goes on to say the associated financial benefits are ‘substantial’ with the improvements expected to have a flow-on effect in terms of improved economic value.

Linz itself says the benefits are expected to exceed initial forecasts thanks to better-than-expected functionality, higher usage of services such as the public land record search, and new sources of value which were identified during delivery.

The organisation had forecast the $175 million cost of the system to be repaid through user fees over 10 years.

The project itself kicked off with business case approval from Cabinet back in 2018.

The program was delivered in four key tranches, each focused on modernising specific aspects of land title and survey services. A scaled, agile approach was adopted, in a move Linz says enabled it to deliver early functionality such as notice services, while continuing to build the more complex features.

Linz says the new platform has enabled log-ins from any device, simplified processes and increased security and robustness, increased automation, and connected the work surveyors and solicitors do when sub-dividing land.

Survey spatial views have also been simplified and improved, and Linz says the system can now be quickly and easily modified in response to changing customer needs, future technology trends and changes in law.