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As well as other things people have mentioned, it's more complicated than that. The Land Registry doesn't cover the whole UK - just England and Wales - and only
by bazzargh 8y ago
As well as other things people have mentioned, it's more complicated than that. The Land Registry doesn't cover the whole UK - just England and Wales - and only about 85% of property. It registers mostly transfers by sale, or long-term leases, but not eg inheritance. So family farms, large estates, etc are not in there. In Scotland the information is held by the Registers of Scotland, and in Northern Ireland it's Land and Property Services - neither of whom provide free access.
- LyndsySimon 8y agoInteresting. I metal detect as a hobby, and often need to determine ownership for places I want to ask permission to search. In the US, everywhere I've ever checked has ownership information publicly available. Most counties and municipalities have a GIS site of some kind that lets you look up ownership on an interactive map; the most difficult case would be that you'd have to call the assessor's office and ask someone to look up the owner of a given parcel. I may be mistaken, but I believe even in that case they're required to make those data available in electronic form upon request. As for privacy, the most common thing I've seen is that people will create an LLC or a trust that owns the property. In those cases the entity's name is tied to the record and the contact information is that of its registered agent. That's almost always a local attorney. Every time I've called them and asked I've been given the name and contact information of the person behind the entity, but at least in theory the attorney could serve as a proxy. Legal entities can make things complicated, but I don't know of any way to actually completely hide ownership if someone wanted to go through the trouble of tracing the chain of holding entities.