How to find out who owns land or a building in England and Wales

"Who owns that?" is the first question in site sourcing and the last one anybody answers well. The register is public, but it is public in two very different ways, and knowing which you are dealing with saves a week.

Two registers, two kinds of owner

HM Land Registry publishes bulk datasets of titles owned by companies and other non-individuals. The CCOD and OCOD files name every freehold and leasehold title in England and Wales held by a UK company, a corporate body, a public authority or an overseas entity, with the registered proprietor, the company number where there is one, and the property address as registered. They are refreshed monthly and cover several million titles.

Titles held by individuals are not in any bulk file. The register still records them, but you get at one by buying the official copy of that title, £7 per document, one at a time, and the name comes back as a name, not as something you can search across.

That single fact shapes every tool in this space. Anything that claims to name individual owners at scale is either buying titles behind the scenes, at that price, or guessing.

Route one: from a title number

If you have a title number, ownership_by_title returns the registered proprietor where the bulk registers know it: the entity, its type, its company number, the country of incorporation for an overseas owner, and the date the record is valid from. Where the title is held by an individual, the answer is that the register does not name them here, not a blank. It costs 3 credits for a licensed record.

Route two: from a company

The reverse question is often the more useful one. ownership_by_company takes a company number and returns every title it holds: a landlord's book, a developer's land bank, a council's estate. That is a portfolio in one call, and the starting point for "what else do they own near here".

Company numbers come from Companies House, and so does the rest of the picture. The owner profile turns a proprietor into an entity you can assess: whether the company is active or dissolved, its people with significant control, its filing history, what it holds. A dissolved owner is a different conversation from an active one, and a sourcing search can exclude them for that reason.

Route three: from a place

For a site you have not identified by title, sourcing_search finds parcels or units by criteria, with the registered owner attached where the register knows it. Filter land by use class and built coverage, units by type, bedrooms, energy band and tenure, either by owner type and years owned. Open space, railways and utility land are excluded by default, because ordered by size they are what every borough's largest parcels turn out to be. It costs 8 credits because the response carries licensed parcel and ownership records; the shortlist it produces is then resolved owner by owner.

What you cannot do, and should not try

Name an individual at scale. The bulk registers do not contain them, the per-title route costs £7 each, and scraping around it breaches the licence. MarketCode does not purchase title documents and does not pretend to know what it does not. Where the register names a company, the platform names the company; where it names a person, the platform says the register does, and stops.

Leases and the layers above

A building often has several titles: the freehold, a head lease, the flats' leases. The freeholder of a block of flats is frequently a company, so the block appears in the bulk data even where every flat is owned by an individual. Read the tenure on the title before concluding that a name is the owner of the homes rather than of the ground.

Do it today

Ask your assistant, with MarketCode connected: "Who owns the titles at Catford Broadway, SE6, and what else does the largest owner hold?" It will resolve the addresses, read the bulk registers, and profile the companies it finds. The Lewisham market page shows the area those titles sit in; the ownership source page lists the licence and the refresh.