Unsticking half a trillion dollars in property transactions
Alberta's Fouad Jallouli on dragging title transfer into the digital age.
In Alberta, $340 million in real estate every day moves through a system that, until recently, was built on paper, fax machines, and processes so old that some of them weren’t even documented anymore. When COVID hit, the province’s land titles system collapsed. By December 2022, a straightforward title transfer that should have taken a week was taking 84 days. Surveys took nearly three months. Sales couldn’t close. Developers couldn’t get financing.
Half a trillion dollars in private property was stuck.
The fix is a $60 million effort to replace decades-old infrastructure with the Alberta Registries for Land Online (ARLO). Fouad Jallouli leads service design for the Government of Alberta—a team of over 75 designers working to make government services actually work for citizens. In this conversation, he walks us through how his team maps out a system so complex that parts of it exist only in the heads of the people who’ve done it for decades; how they decide what to fix first; and how technology can help—but only if you start with the human experience.