Land Transfer Act (No. 52 of 1952).

This Act, consisting of 13 Parts and eight Schedules, is a piece of basic legislation on land law covering all aspects of the registration and transfer of title to land. Land is defined as including "messuages, tenements, and hereditaments, corporeal and incorporeal, of every kind and description, and every estate or interest therein, together with all paths, passages, ways, waters, watercourses, liberties, easements, and privileges thereunto appertaining, plantations, gardens, mines, minerals, and quarries, and all trees and timber thereon or thereunder lying or being, unless specially excepted". It is divided as follows: Administration (I); Land subject to this Act (II); Registration (III); Certificate of title (IV); Title to access strips (IVa); Transfers (V); Mortgages (VI); Leases (VII); Transmissions, trusts, caveats and powers of attorney (VIII); General provisions as to instruments (IX); Plans and surveys (X); Guarantee of title (XI); Compulsory registration of titles (XII); General provisions (XIII). The schedules to the Act contain model forms of various documents, covenants implied in mortgages, covenants implied in instruments, attestation of instruments, scale of charges for landbrokers and enactments repealed. The Act applies to (a) all land which has already in any manner become subject to the provisions of any former Land Transfer Act; (b) all land hereafter alienated or contracted to be alienated from the Crown in fee; (c) all land in respect of which any order is hereafter made under the provisions of any Maori Land Act in force for the time being which has the effect of vesting that land in any person in freehold tenure; (d) all land which hereafter becomes vested in any person for an estate in fee simple in possession by virtue of any Act of the Parliament of New Zealand.