Decades ago, a man bought a plot of land on one dunam. He hoped that one day it would materialize, and become a construction project. Years passed, the planning did not progress – and he passed away. He had three heirs, who became the rightful owners of the land. Several more years have passed, and as often happens in Israel – the planning has hardly progressed, and there is nothing to talk about realization at all. The three heirs had also passed away, and each had four heirs. Today there are 12 owners per acre of land.
When those 12 heirs began to find out what was going on with the planning of the land, they discovered that in the same dunam they owned, there was a small area that belonged to another owner – and that he too had already set up heirs. Thus, without the condition of the land changing, one dunam became a problem: the problem of multiplicity of owners, of which there are innumerable in Israel. Today it is considered one of the biggest challenges in the world of Israeli design.
Rights to a “piece of land” of 100 meters
“This is a very complex issue,” says Adv. Yossi Musari, a partner in the law firm of Musari & Habib, which deals with real estate and land in planning proceedings. “There are many complexes with thousands of owners. Each of them holds, at best, about half an acre, and at worst a strip of only 100 feet. When a particular entity seeks to advance planning on the land, it may find that hundreds of those owners, even thousands, are defined as not located. The result is that the work of placing the people and associating each of them with the relevant land, in order to advance the planning procedures, is delayed, and the actual implementation of the planning is postponed for decades.
“Take, for example, the H / 500 plan in Holon: in the area of the Moledet neighborhood within its borders, plots of land were bought before the establishment of the state, by many private individuals. Some perished in the Holocaust, some left the country and died. “Divorced people will one day find it worthwhile to find out what happened to them. Today there are thousands of undiscovered husbands there.”
“The main problem with land with many owners is that it is simply difficult to keep track of all the owners,” says Shai Arnett-Cohen, CEO of the Hadera Economic Company, which is currently promoting the “Sea Quarter” program in the city, with hundreds of landowners. Plan, landowners are selling more and more plots and splitting the land more and more. “Without you feeling it, from land on which there were 100 or 200 owners, after five or 10 years, suddenly there are 1,000 different owners, and many of them are not burning to implement the plan.”
Shai Arnet-Cohen / Photo: Courtesy of Hadera Economic Company
There are quite a few such lands in Israel – quite a few of them are intended for the construction of thousands of housing units: the Great Bloc in Tel Aviv, the Kikar Hamedina plan, the Blue Beach in Herzliya, the Yarkon landscape in Hod Hasharon, the eastern coastal strip in Ramat Hasharon – all “stuck” for years; In all, or at least in the vast majority, the matter is delayed around the issue of the multiplicity of landowners. At the current price level, they cannot be blamed.
“There is no table of unification and division without opposition”
One of the important stages in the formation of plans in which there is a multiplicity of owners in the land, is the stage of unification and redistribution – re-parcelation – that is required after the approval of the plan. Simply put, this is the stage where the “cake” – the land – is redistributed, to determine exactly the rights of each landowner before the construction is implemented (incoming status) and based on that let everyone know what they will get after the plan is completed (outgoing status). These calculations go into the balance and allocation table, which is formulated by the program appraiser.
“This table describes in detail the existing situation, what is actually registered on the same land,” explains real estate appraiser and lawyer Erez Cohen, “and the new situation – the situation where the registered owners receive allocations in the new plots, ie land rights. This is a complex task, not just because Thousands of landowners who own plots of land, or share one piece of land with several people: in the outgoing situation there is also no uniform planning, as the new plan will often include towers, detached houses, employment areas, etc. This is a mosaic of uses, which the appraiser must also express “Set a price tag for each of the designations, so that in the end each landowner will receive, depending on the area he owns, his relative share.”
“To date, every consolidation and division table I have made has drawn comments and objections. What is the reason for this? Differences in value between different places in the program and more.
“This is the moment when the arguments begin, and this is basically the main problem of the unification and division phase: every landowner is sure that his relative share in the incoming condition is worth more than what was determined by the appraiser, and that the new allotment in the outgoing condition is less than he deserves. “It takes a long time – and as soon as petitions are filed in court, it immediately stalls the whole process. One such person out of 1,000 owners is enough, and an entire plan can be delayed almost effortlessly.”
Reality: 20 years and more of delays
How long in practice do such plans “get stuck” due to the same property and legal issues? The answer to this is astonishing, and quite sad: year after year, to the point where an innocent piece of land will be realized only three generations after the day it was bought.
“A situation of multiple partners leads to paralysis in decision-making, inability to reach agreements, and this is mutual damage to everyone,” says Adv. Yifat Ben-Aryeh Steinberg, director of the planning and construction and litigation department at Zvi’s office again. One wants something else – and this is another situation where there are landowners, and there are those who will make decisions, even if there is no connection between them. What happens if one of them goes bankrupt and enters a foreclosure proceeding? And what if one of them is under 18? These are cases that require court approval at every step. “Each such issue in itself produces years of proceedings.”
Adv. David Besson, a partner in the firm of the wet, Bornstein law firm, Besson adds that “the separation between the planning process and the property process in Israel should also be remembered. The court to hear the property, to file a petition for the rights they have received. They file the lawsuit against the committees, come to the Supreme Court if they want, and this procedure alone lasts four or five years. “That could last a decade.”
The magic word: sharing agreement
Advocate Musari notes that “when it comes to multiple owners who are not organized together, the postponement of the realization of the construction on the land can reach at least 10 to 20 years. “The best example of this is the issue of the big bloc: its basic plan was approved in 1976, and it took about 40 years to locate the owners, organize them and use legal tools that will bring us today to where we are before they are realized.”
The potential for delays in multi-owner land plans is endless. In practice, and based on past experience, such a plan can remain at the stage of agreements between the landowners and not move forward at all, until a dramatic move arrives that will change the existing state of affairs. One option is the entry of a private entrepreneur, who manages to purchase most or all of the land, and then promotes the program himself; Another option, which is considered by many to be a preferred option on the part of the landowners themselves, is to formulate a sharing agreement.
“The purpose of the partnership agreements is to bind the owners together, to regulate their rights, to regulate the designation of the land on which they hold or to implement the detailed planning jointly,” explains Adv. Ben Aryeh Steinberg, “so that they can access the authority as one piece, and The planning.
“There are a lot of aspects that are included in sharing agreements: how to bear expenses, what is the relative share of each owner, what happens if everyone does not agree, how to resolve a situation of disagreement and more. Once there is a sharing agreement, a mechanism is created. They are all in the same cart, sometimes putting an entrepreneur in the picture, running on behalf of the people and slowly joining in, ‘by the power of inertia’; there are also cases where a team of lawyers, appraisers and architects form together Them, and allows us to move forward. “
Advocate Musari adds that “the way to deal with the issue of multi-owner is first and foremost to help the authority through the early organization in sharing agreements. This is how one sees the owner as one piece. If, for example, I represent 1,000 people on a certain piece of land, who together hold land equivalent to 20 buildings, I make life easier for the appraiser, because it is easy for him to assign the land to the owner and decide how much it will be worth in the outgoing situation.
“From the landowners’ point of view, the same appraiser must sit with me and consider me when deciding what to give this group of owners, and this is of immense importance: a landowner who does not want to be plotted, or is not represented by someone by name, will be placed in the new state. “
“The municipality does not have to locate everyone”
And there is another matter here: the local authority. Compared to a multi-owner land plan promoted only by the landowners themselves, such a plan promoted by the authority is a different world – thanks to various tools given to it by law.
“In fact, I do not see a situation where multi-owner land is realized in less than 30 years without the permission,” says Arnett-Cohen. “The reason for this is simple: according to the planning and building laws, when a plan is submitted by the local authority it can submit a consolidation and division appendix without the consent of all the owners: it does not have to locate them all, and can set off. .
“I will note that this way does not infringe on the property rights of the owners, as they may object to the plan and the appendix to the unification and division later on – at the objections stage, which will be submitted to the district committee.”
Sde Dov Tender: Low winning price due to hundreds of private owners?
Last March, a second tender was successfully marketed by the Israel Land Authority (RMI) for land in the Sde Dov Airport complex: land for the construction of 241 housing units, marketed to real estate developer Claude Nachmias, for about NIS 654 million. This amount reflected a price of NIS 2.8 million per unit of land, which is considered significantly lower than the first tender marketed in the district.
Many professionals claim that this is due to the fact that only about 71% of the area is state-owned, while about 29% is privately owned. It was the increase in land ownership that led to the low price, and to the minority of participants in the tender – only three.
“Postponement of implementation of one year or more”
“There may be other factors that influenced the price, but there is no doubt that the main factor was the fact that the land could not be realized immediately,” says appraiser Erez Cohen. “The winning developer will have to reach either a sharing agreement or dissolution of a partnership – and the latter entails many expenses, a procedure for appointing a receiver and more. At best it is a postponement of a year or more, “There will be appeals and the like, the postponement of the implementation can easily reach a decade.”
Adv. Yossi Musari adds that “this is an area in which the private part of the land belongs to hundreds of people, and they are the ones who were not located or did not organize. They were placed in a ‘refugee building’. Now Nahmias should hope to be able to locate all the owners within three to five years, and then file a lawsuit for the dissolution of a partnership, which will take at best two to two and a half years. He captivated hundreds of millions for this purchase, and went into delaying realization of between five and seven years. At that time, the market may change downwards – and who knows what will happen then. “