Do you actually need physical deeds of a house nowadays?

There is a bundle of documents, yes.

Ownership details of most plots of land is registered, and there is an electronic database, yes.

See www.landdirect.ie

However, the bundle of documents contains much more info than what you can see on Land Direct.

Yes, owners should keep the documents safely.

Some people suggest putting them in a safe.

Yes, if you want to sell a house, you need the title documents.

If the owner doesn't have the title documents, it is possible to re-constitute them.

A sol would be required for that.

Just looking at that landdirect site.... I cant pull up any details but see some houses are green crosshatched and other indicated in red. What is significance? I thought our place was centrally registered and that the deeds are just of historic interest. I wanted to check what is down for us as the house numbers in the estate were changed about 5 yrs after we purchased.

Not all titles are registered. universal compulsory registration only started in 2011. It applies to sales after that time. Before that compulsory registration did not apply to all titles. It will take decades before all titles are registered at the current rate of progress. If a title is not registered the owner certainly needs to keep the deeds

there were only three counties in the compulsory registration system until 2006, when four more were added. There are unregistered titles all over the country.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics. Most farmland is registered as a result of the property confiscations of the early 20th century. Urban titles are much less likely to be registered. Second hand houses in older urban areas would only be registered if the changed hands in the last 15 years.

I dunno about that. Don't you just order them from the land registry? About 25 euro?

It's kind of confusing. Just to sum it up again:

There are two different systems to record the ownership of property in Ireland. The registry of deeds is the original one, where someone holds a collection of physical paper documents which show records of historical ownership, burdens, sales etc., sometimes going back centuries. That system has been increasingly replaced since the "new" land registry system started operating in 1970. Here you don't have physical documents anymore, since all details are recorded in a digital "folio", the accuracy of which is guaranteed by the state. It has been the mandatory registration system for all changes of ownership in the whole of the country since 2011. You can only be registered in one of the systems, meaning you have either a collection of physical deeds or a digital folio.

By now the vast majority of properties and 93% of the land mass in the state are represented by a folio and do not have physical deeds attached anymore, including all properties that have been build or sold since 2011. Any sale leads to mandatory registration now, so as a buyer you will not be handed the deeds of the property but instead a folio number in the digital land registry. Deeds will be a thing of the past in a few years.

Yes, my mistake. You are right in that the purchaser is responsible for starting the registration process within 6 months after closing. I thought it was the vendor, because I once bought a house that had been built in the 1950s and it was already registered, even though it had never changed hands before. Apparently you can voluntarily register property even without sale or maybe they lost the deeds at some point, I don't know.