A Bahamian economist says his country’s title law is breeding land barons. For Jamaicans holding family land they seldom see, the warning travels well.
NASSAU, Bahamas, 21 October 2026: Meredith Johnson found out the way many Bahamian landowners do: someone told her. A petition had been filed in the Supreme Court to quiet title to land her father began securing around 1992 and which was conveyed to her in 2021, and she had 21 days to object. What followed, she told The Tribune in May, was a scramble for documents, lawyers and surveyors, paid for with money she had set aside for her children and her business.
Last week an economist gave that kind of story a name. Speaking at the Exuma Business Outlook conference, Rupert Pinder, an associate professor of economics at the University of The Bahamas, said the quieting process was creating “land barons”, The Tribune reported, and that the country could not expect investment where property rights were poorly protected.
How quieting works, and who it favours
The Quieting Titles Act was meant to tidy up a messy inheritance. A person claiming land petitions the court, which weighs evidence of possession, occupation, historical use and documents. Anyone with a competing interest may object within a set period. If no valid objection arrives, the court can grant a certificate of title, and land that was difficult to sell, mortgage or develop becomes a clean asset.
Mr Pinder’s argument is that the same mechanism rewards whoever is first, best advised and best funded. He described people clearing other people’s land and simply occupying it, and questioned whether cutting the adverse possession period, the years of unchallenged occupation after which an owner loses the right to recover land, from 20 to 12 had solved anything. The largest landowner in the country, he noted, is the Government itself through Crown land, and he argued that current arrangements serve a small group while many Bahamians struggle for land and housing. Pointing to far more crowded islands such as Barbados, he said Bahamian housing pressure was a product of policy rather than any real shortage of space.
The courts have seen where the system can lead. In 2022 the Chief Justice set aside a title to two Exuma cays, Lumber Cay and Jim Cay, valued together at about $29 million, ruling that it had been obtained through fraud and abuse of the Act and that a later sale of the islands was void, The Tribune reported. The petitioner’s lawyer denied any fraud, and a fresh petition for the same cays followed in 2023, opposed by an estate that also claimed them.
A register, decades away
The Bahamas is trying a deeper repair. In 2025 Parliament passed the Land Adjudication Act and the Registered Land Act, which received assent that August. Together they are meant to move the country from a system of deeds to a central register, in which ownership passes only on registration and only after land has been vetted. The first registrar of lands was appointed in January, but lawmakers and lawyers expect full implementation to take decades, with the old system and the new running side by side.
Jamaica’s version of the problem
Jamaica starts from a different place. It already has a register of titles, so the challenge here is getting land onto it. In June the minister with responsibility for land and titling told the House of Representatives that roughly 970,000 parcels sat on the Government’s valuation roll and only about 550,000 had titles, that around 600,000 new titles would be needed to settle the country’s land problems, and that the job could take up to 20 years, the Jamaica Observer reported. Checks on the island’s land settlements, he said, suggested that about a third of those parcels had already been informally subdivided.
The law on squatting is already where the Bahamas has moved to. Under Jamaica’s Limitation of Actions Act, 12 years of unchallenged possession can extinguish the paper owner’s right to recover private land, while Crown land requires 60. In 2022 the head of the Jamaican Bar Association, speaking personally, called for that rule to be reviewed on the grounds that it effectively rewards squatting, the Observer reported at the time.
Anyone who knows Jamaican family land will recognise the risk Mr Pinder is describing. A plot is left to several children, most of whom now live in Toronto, Brooklyn or Birmingham. One relative, or sometimes a neighbour, occupies it. It is never formally divided, and the paperwork sits in a drawer in another country. Those are precisely the owners least able to answer a notice within weeks, and the people most likely to lose out when the race to formalise land is won by whoever reaches the courthouse first.
None of this makes titling a mistake. Untitled land is hard to borrow against, hard to sell and hard to pass on cleanly, and Jamaica’s titling drive has real value for households and the wider property market. The lesson from Nassau is about method. Systematic registration, carried out by the State across whole communities, gives absent owners a chance to be found. A system that waits for individuals to petition, and for others to object in time, tends to reward the person holding the pen.
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