The program to modernise New Zealand’s land titles and survey system has come in on time and under budget.

Last year, Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) achieved a huge milestone by moving all external customers to the new version of Landonline and switching off legacy access.

Landonline is LINZ’s platform that supports New Zealand’s entire land titles and survey system, property transactions and development.

The 2025 milestone marked the successful conclusion of the modernisation program through the Survey and Title Enhancement Program (STEP), which saw the majority of business case benefits realised.

According to LINZ, the upgraded system is more secure, intuitive and accessible, making it easier to support the thousands of surveyors, conveyancers and other property sector professionals who use it every day.

The outcomes of the decade-long process have been outlined in a new report, Modernising Landonline The Survey and Title Enhancement Programme – Closure Report.

Landonline in numbers

Landonline has more than 12,000 users who conduct approximately 5,000 interactions or queries every day (2022-23 figures).

The system itself holds 2.3 million active land titles and 2.6 million surveyed parcels of land, including roads, rivers, lakes and seabed.

Users include:

• Surveyors
• Lawyers/conveyancers
• Territorial authorities
• Local councils
• Financial institutions
• The Te Kooti Whenua the Māori Land Court (with all Court orders being registered with LINZ to update the Māori Freehold Land Register)
• Companies such as Google Maps

Customer led, built in-house

LINZ says one of the STEP’s strongest points was its emphasis on customer partnership, with surveyors, lawyers, territorial authorities and financial institutions being closely involved in designing and testing new functionalities.

It was also notable for being customer led, fully conducted by in-house experts (no external vendor was used) and delivered via the scaled agile development method.

The scaled agile method meant that “Iterative releases of functionality (the central tenet of Agile methodology) allowed fast moving testing and refinement processes and quick resolution of issues,” the report says.

“A key objective of the programme was to establish in-house capability that would allow LINZ to keep enhancing and maintaining Landonline without future one-off technology investments,” the report adds.

Replacement of the Legacy platform has not been viewed by LINZ as the end of the program, rather it is a “step toward delivery of an on-going evergreen system that placed customers as key strategic partners when decisions on meeting survey and title system needs were made”.

Importantly, “LINZ has successfully transitioned from a programme delivery focus to an  internally governed operating model, with skilled software teams working within Agile frameworks to complete the final modernisation initiatives, maintain the platform and work with customers on future enhancements”.

The in-house team will continue to maintain and enhance the system, making incremental improvements in line with customer needs.