LINZ and its predecessors have been responsible for cadastral data in New Zealand for more than a hundred years.

National mapping of parcels was undertaken as part of the maintenance and indexing roles with scales ranging from 1:396 (50 links to an inch) to 1:50,000. The predominant scales in urban areas were 1:792, 1:1000, 1:1584 and 1:2000. Predominant rural scales were of 1:7920 and 1:10,000.

The first digital data was created in the late 1980’s (along with the creation of the Department of Survey and Land Information) by hand digitising the department's cadastral record maps into the digital cadastral database (DCDB). The DCDB provided the graphical index to survey records throughout New Zealand until the implementation of Landonline (2000-2002).

As Landonline was rolled out to each Land District, that district’s DCDB data was converted into the Landonline database (also known as the Core Record System or CRS) and then decommissioned. The survey conversion project scanned survey plans and converted them to 1.4 million electronic files. Additionally, boundary dimensions for a total of 1.4 million parcels were captured from around 300,000 surveys. This involved the capture of some 13 million observations and the adjustment of five million geodetic survey marks.

Unlike the prior systems that subsequently mapped cadastral records, Landonline is 'live' and reflects real-time transactions as it enables surveyors, lawyers and other land professionals (including Territorial Authorities) to search and lodge title dealings and survey data digitally. New parcel shapes are therefore survey accurate. However as the change to parcels (attributes or shape) is mainly driven by the subdivision process, only a small portion of the parcels dataset will be changing at any given point of time.