"My client approached me nearly two years ago about acquiring ownership of a property in Hungary by way of eminent domain, having used it for more than 15 years without disturbance and in good faith. The acquisition of the property by that title was finally established by the court. However, the property was subject to a usufructuary right, which was acquired by the holder sometime in the 1970s.
The beneficial owner was, according to the information available, a very elderly man whose last known address was on another continent nearly 50 years ago. While the right of ownership can be obtained by legal action against the former owner in the case of dispossession, it is not possible to obtain a court judgment to cancel the beneficial ownership of the property against the holder on this ground.
This has led to the legal situation where our client has become the sole owner of a property subject to a usufruct right to which the right holder has never actually used the property and was already living in another country, many thousands of kilometres away, when that right was created half a century ago. Thus, the property was unmarketable for my client with this encumbrance, he could not sell it, because who would buy a house on which an unknown person had a beneficial interest.
In the Land Registry, this usufruct can only be cancelled by a declaration of renunciation by the beneficiary or by the original death certificate attesting to the deceased's death. Unfortunately, there is no legal procedure for cancelling, by any presumption, the right of a person who is unreachable to the owner, who lives far away, who, according to the available data, is in his eighties and who has not been effectively connected with the use of the property for a long time.
In order to find a solution to the case, I first tried to contact the beneficial owner at the foreign address I had found in the land registry and in the documents of the probate proceedings of the last century. I was unsuccessful, however, because the person concerned had long been unavailable at that address. Fortunately, the beneficiary did not have a common surname in that country, so I tried to find his contact details through databases, directories and social networking sites available on the Internet. In doing so, I called a number of people with similar names by phone and via the Internet.
This process was long in itself, and in the meantime my client, losing a little hope, was also trying to find the person in the distant country through diplomatic channels, in parallel with the involvement of the ministries. Unfortunately, these formal procedures were also unsuccessful. The breakthrough in this case came when luck smiled on me and I managed to leave a message on the answering machine of one of the person's children in the country concerned, who listened to it and called me back.
He said that the person he was looking for was his mother, who unfortunately passed away years ago. He also indicated that he did not have the original document required, but provided all the missing personal information to enable me to proceed with the authorities outside to obtain the death certificate. I attempted to do this remotely. It should be stressed that this was during the time of the covid epidemic and the associated curfew restrictions around the world. Despite repeated attempts, I was unsuccessful with the foreign authorities, and finally, after several procedural inquiries, I was informed that the death certificate would only be issued to the relatives of the deceased. As a result, I spent many months negotiating with the claimant's now well-adult child to obtain his willingness to assist in obtaining his mother's official original death certificate, given the restrictions and the stumbling block in the authorities there.
It has to be said that I needed not only luck, but also the goodwill of the relative I found to finally obtain the original death certificate, which was essential for the cancellation of the beneficial title.
Of course, my client was forced to keep financing all the costs of the official procedures outside the country in order to be able to help us with the deceased child.
But perseverance finally paid off and after nearly 3 years of work, the original, long-awaited document arrived at our law office one day by express mail. Then, armed with the necessary document, the cancellation of the usufruct could be quickly done in the national land registry.
This was one of the interesting and unique professional successes of my law practice.
However, the story above also shows that it is easy for many of us to find ourselves in a legal situation involving real estate where it is extremely difficult, or sometimes almost impossible, to find an easy, self-evident, quick legal solution. It could easily have happened in the above case that I could not find any information about the deceased, and in that case I would not have been able to achieve the desired goal."
If you have a similar problem with an unavailable beneficiary, widow's right holder or other encumbrances on real estate regarding the cancellation of the land register, please contact our lawyer Dr. György Zalavári, who will try to find a solution for your case.
Dr. György Zalavári LL.M.
Ecovis Zalavári Legal Hungary
Lawyer | Mediator | Corporate Law and Data Protection Specialist
gyorgy.zalavari@ecovis.hu