Title, Encumbrances & Burdens: The Land Registry in a Deal

A property deal can look clean on the surface — price agreed, financing in place, completion date set — and still end up wobbling because the legal foundation has not been checked all the way to the bottom. That foundation sits in the tingbogen (the Land Registry), and it is built around three sections: title, encumbrances and burdens. Who owns the property, what does it owe, and what is it bound to tolerate or do. Until those three questions are answered with documentation, not assumptions, the deal is not settled.

Title, encumbrances and burdens are not a formality you clear out of the way at the very end. They are the frame everything else in the deal hangs on. An unresolved title, a forgotten encumbrance, or an easement that gets in the way of the intended use are among the most common reasons a deal slips late — or collapses entirely. And all of them are visible in the Land Registry, if you read it correctly and in good time.

The three sections — and what each one binds

The Land Registry is Denmark’s official, digital register of rights over real property, and it is built around precisely three sections. When you pull a tingbogsattest (Land Registry certificate) on a property, you read them in this order:

• The title section shows who holds the registered right to dispose of the property — typically through a registered deed. This is where you verify that the seller really is the party who can sell.
• The encumbrance section shows the monetary claims secured against the property: mortgage deeds, bank loans, owner’s mortgages, attachments. This is the debt that follows the bricks and the land, not the person.
• The burden section shows the easements and restrictions on use that bind the property: rights of way, utility and cable rights, building lines, preservation provisions, rights of first refusal and so on.

Together, the three sections paint the full legal picture of the property. A thorough walkthrough of how to read each section field by field can be found in our guide to reading a Land Registry certificate from title to easements. Here we look at what each section means for the deal itself — and where it goes wrong.

Title: does the seller actually own what is being sold?

Title is about legitimacy. Whoever signs the deed as seller must be listed as the registered title holder — otherwise that party has no power to dispose of the property in registration terms. It sounds trivial, but deviations are common and cost time:

• Estate of a deceased person, or undivided estate. The deceased is still listed as the title holder. The sale requires documentation that the estate can dispose of the property — a probate certificate, and where relevant proof of an executor’s or heir’s authority — before a deed can be finally registered.
• A company undergoing a name change or restructuring. The seller is a company, but the CVR (the Central Business Register) shows a merger, a name change, or a signing rule that does not match the signatory. This has to line up before the deed goes through.
• A previous deal not finally registered. A conditional deed from an earlier transaction may still be sitting there with a deadline or a reservation, so the title is not in fact clean.
• Spousal relations and restrictions on disposal. For certain year-round homes, a spouse’s consent to the sale may be required.

The point is that the title section should not just be read — it must be reconciled against reality in the CVR (for companies), the probate court (for estates), and the actual authority behind the signature. A title that looks fine on the certificate but cannot be documented behind the section will not hold up at final registration.

Encumbrances: the debt that follows the property

Encumbrances are monetary claims secured against the property. The central principle is that they follow the property, not the owner — if you take over a property without having the encumbrances cleared, you effectively take them over with it. That is why the heart of a clean deal is that every encumbrance not meant to be assumed is redeemed and discharged at closing.

Rule of thumb: every encumbrance against the property must either be redeemed and discharged no later than at completion, or expressly assumed by agreement. There is no intermediate state.

In practice, this means the apportionment statement and the redemption have to be tightly coordinated between the buyer’s and seller’s banks. This is where banks and mortgage credit institutions have the heaviest interest — it is their security that has to be protected or redeemed at the right time, for the right amount.

The pitfalls typically concern the encumbrances people overlook or misjudge:

• Owner’s mortgages “in the drawer.” An owner’s mortgage may sit registered with no current debt behind it, but it still occupies a place in the priority order and may have been pledged to a bank. It needs to be clarified and usually discharged — not assumed to be empty.
• Attachments and seizures. A registered attachment by a creditor signals financial pressure on the seller and must be redeemed before the title can be transferred clean.
• Outstanding balance versus principal. The principal on a mortgage deed says nothing about the current outstanding balance. The redemption amount has to be obtained as a current statement from the creditor.
• Redemption price on mortgage debt. When redeeming a mortgage loan, the bond price and any fees can affect the real amount considerably — that belongs in the financial assessment of the deal.

Registering the new deed and discharging the old encumbrances triggers a land registration fee, and it can add up. How the fee is calculated on a deed and on an easement respectively — and where you can save by using the fee exemptions available when re-mortgaging — we cover in the article on the land registration fee on a deed and an easement.

Burdens: easements that can move the whole premise

The burden section is the one most often underrated — and the one that can topple a deal late, because a burden rarely costs money directly, but instead constrains the use. For an investor or developer, it is precisely the use that carries the price.

An easement may, for example:

• grant the neighbouring property a road or right of way across the site,
• secure a utility company’s cable rights with an associated building prohibition along a corridor,
• fix building lines, the extent of development, or façade provisions that are stricter than the local plan’s,
• impose preservation provisions on a building,
• or grant a third party a right of first refusal.

The critical part is that a burden can be in direct conflict with the use the buyer has built their figures on. A site that, under the local plan, can be developed at high density may, through a private easement, be bound to far less — and the easement then has to be respected regardless of the plan. So it is not enough to establish that there are burdens; each one must be read in its full wording, and you must clarify who holds the right to enforce it, and whether the burden can be discharged or has to be respected.

A particular point of attention: certain older easements refer to map annexes or covenants that do not appear in full on the certificate itself. Here the underlying document has to be obtained — otherwise you are assessing a burden whose wording you have not seen. The interplay with public planning is a discipline of its own; if you need to get a handle on how a local plan’s provisions read against the easements, you can start from our walkthrough of how to read a local plan.

How the three sections tie the deal together at closing

In practice, the sections work together towards completion:

1. Title is verified first. Is the seller listed as the title holder, and can the power to dispose be documented? If not, everything else stops here.
2. Encumbrances are mapped and redemption amounts obtained. What is to be redeemed, what is assumed, and are the banks involved coordinating redemption and release of security at the right time?
3. Burdens are reviewed for conflict with the use. Each easement is read in its wording; conflicts with the buyer’s plans are resolved before signing — not after.
4. The new deed is registered, the old encumbrances discharged, the apportionment statement and the fee are settled, and the deal is closed.

This sequence is the core of legal due diligence on a property and belongs naturally alongside the broader investigation of the cadastre, the planning basis and the physical conditions. If you want the full overview of what — beyond the Land Registry — should be checked before a deal or a project acquisition, follow the checklist for site due diligence — from cadastre to project proposal.

When the manual exercise needs to go faster

Pulling together title, encumbrances and burdens for a single property is manageable by hand — it just requires you to retrieve the Land Registry certificate, reconcile the title against the CVR and the probate court, obtain redemption statements, and read each easement in its full wording. It takes time, and it scales poorly when you are screening several properties at once.

In Arcili’s Ejendomme (Properties) module, the public information on a given property — land registration, BBR (the Buildings & Dwellings Register), planning status, financials and the surrounding area — is gathered in a single lookup, so you can quickly form a first impression of title, encumbrances and burdens and prioritise which properties are worth examining in depth. It does not replace the lawyer’s final review or full verification at the source — but it removes the hours spent gathering data, so the expertise can go into the assessment rather than the collection.

Want to see what it looks like on a specific property? Explore Arcili or book a walkthrough.