Ejendomsdatarapport: the 105 kroner report behind every Danish sale

Every Danish house sale comes with a stack of reports, and the cheapest one in the stack is the one that tells you whether the ground is contaminated and the extension was ever approved.

The ejendomsdatarapport is a report the Danish state assembles from public registers about a single property, sold through an online service for a fee. Erhvervsstyrelsen, the Danish Business Authority, publishes the fee, 105 kroner, and the regulation behind the service lets the buyer of the report update it free of charge for six months, at most twice.

What is in the report, and who produces it?

The legal basis is the DIADEM regulation, Bekendtgørelse nr. 1547 af 18. december 2019 om digital adgang til ejendomsoplysninger i forbindelse med ejendomshandel. Section 1 states that the Minister for Business establishes and runs an internet service for delivering ejendomsdatarapporter for use in property transactions. Section 2 makes whoever orders the report pay a fee, which may be adjusted for prices and wages each 1 January and is published on Erhvervsstyrelsen's website.

The state's housing portal boligejer.dk, where the report is sold, describes it as a single point of access to around 50 publicly registered pieces of information and documents about a property: buildings, finances, plans, water, soil contamination, nature, forest and agriculture, and building and protection lines, drawn from municipalities, the tax administration and the regions, with the condition report, the energy label and the soil contamination certificate attached where they exist. Erhvervsstyrelsen's fee page states that the ejendomsdatarapport costs 105 kroner and gathers information used in property sales from municipalities, the tax agency and the regions, together with the condition report, the energy label and soil contamination certificates.

How long does it stay valid?

Section 3 of the DIADEM regulation gives the answer in the form of an update right. For six months after ordering, the person who bought the report can update it through the service without paying again, at most twice, except for data sources that have changed materially since the report was pulled. In practice the report therefore has a six month life, and a report older than that has to be bought again.

The other documents in a Danish sale carry their own clocks. The consumer protection act for property purchases, lov om forbrugerbeskyttelse ved erhvervelse af fast ejendom, requires in section 4 that a condition report, the tilstandsrapport, be prepared or renewed by the appointed surveyor less than six months before the day the buyer receives it, and in section 4 a that the electrical installation report be less than one year old on that day. The Danish Energy Agency states that an energy label is valid for ten years and can be reused if the building is sold several times within that period.

What can the report not tell you?

It is a register pull, not an inspection. The report shows what the authorities have recorded about the property; it does not show whether the roof leaks. That job belongs to the tilstandsrapport and the elinstallationsrapport under the huseftersyn scheme, and those two documents carry a legal price the ejendomsdatarapport does not. Section 2 of the consumer protection act states that once the buyer has received a condition report, an electrical installation report and information about ownership change insurance before making an offer, the buyer can no longer claim against the seller that the building's physical condition is defective or that its installations are unlawful, nor that a fault should have been mentioned in the reports. The categories in the electrical report are decoded in our guide to the elinstallationsrapport.

The ejendomsdatarapport sits before that trade off. Its value is the list of things a surveyor never looks at: planning status, registered contamination, protection lines and the building register's version of what stands on the plot, which is where an unapproved extension shows up as a mismatch between the register and the house.

Who orders it, and when?

The regulation only says that the person ordering pays. The state's citizen portal, borger.dk, says it is typically the seller, or the seller's adviser, who buys the report so that the buyer can get the information about the property. Whoever holds it can update it twice in six months, so a report pulled at listing can be refreshed before the deed. A buyer who receives one dated more than six months back is holding a report the service itself would no longer update.

Read the register lines against the house in front of you, then hand the physical questions to the surveyor. AiMYNDi reads the ejendomsdatarapport and the condition report together and flags where the register and the building disagree.