7 ms·

Something that always seems wild to me in England is that there is no exact record of property boundaries. Specifically, in England and Wales there's usually no

by dkarp 6y ago

Something that always seems wild to me in England is that there is no exact record of property boundaries. Specifically, in England and Wales there's usually no record of the exact boundary between two properties and who owns the hedge, wall, tree or fence between 2 properties[1]. There are only "title plans" held by HM Land Registry, that may or may not include information about who owns the wall and exactly what delineates the property line. If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege. I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information. I recently looked on US property websites and was surprised that the map showed the exact edge of the property as well as every other property around it. That just isn't possible in England. No such map seems to exist unless I've understood things incorrectly. 1: https://www.gov.uk/your-property-boundaries#legalboundaries https://www.gov.uk/your-property-boundaries#legalboundaries

pmyteh 6y ago
And worse - not all properties are even registered: there's no complete cadastral survey. It's now compulsory to register land on sale, but there are lots of pieces that haven't been sold in decades or centuries. This can result in some quite odd outcomes. The road outside my house, for example, isn't owned by the local council like most roads, but is 'unadopted'. It's probably owned by the descendents of the builder who laid out the road and built the houses in the 1840s, but as it would be a liability rather than an asset (and was probably forgotten about shortly after the last house was sold in any case) nobody knows who that is. There are ways around this. We have specialised title insurance to cover the risk that the road isn't actually a right of way, and there are provisions in English & Welsh law that give responsibility for road maintenance to the frontagers (like me) if the road owner isn't known. But it's added a surprising amount of friction. If there were a 'register or lose it' provision then it's likely something sane could be worked out once the land reverted to the crown. But as it is, we're in this weird semi-purgatory forever. No way of claiming adverse possession over a road, sadly...
- moonbug 6y ago
  Always seemed odd to me that there's no way to compel a local authority to take ownership and responsibiltiy for an unadopted road.
  - pmyteh 6y ago
    AIUI they (often?) will take it over, but only after it's been made up to the same standard that a new road would need to be for them to adopt it. Which is quite the undertaking, especially when you need to persuade each individual frontager to cough up for the building works.
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  It's not adverse possession, but does your jurisdiction not recognize implied easements? Easements don't change ownership of the underlying land, they just establish a right to use/control the land in a particular way. Road access would (in many jurisdictions) be protected by an easement implied by necessarity (because access is a necessity) or an easement implied by past usage (analogous to adverse possession).
  - pmyteh 6y ago
    It does, and it's very likely that we'd eventually win in court if it became an issue. But AIUI, we'd need testimony to 20 years of continuous access as of right to our house (not any of the others on the street). As a newcomer, that's not entirely trivial - the people we bought it from were only here 8 years, and I think we'd need to go another two owners back to get the full 20. And in any case the court case (and inevitable buggeration in the lead up to it) would be expensive and unpleasant. Anyway, the building society (mortgage holder) wanted better security than that, so insurance it is.
    - 7952 6y ago
      I wonder if aerial photos would show cars parked and help prove it.
- 7952 6y ago
  Most roads are actually not owned by the local authority. Adoption means tthey take over responsibility but the freehold remains with the original owner. Title plans are drawn to the assumed highway rather than the original ownership. The definitive information is most likely to be in conveyance documents.
KineticLensman 6y ago
Amazingly the HM Land Registry [0] doesn't actually identify the ownership of all land in the UK. Specifically, land only needs to be registered when it is sold or transferred in certain ways - which puts it on the system, as it were. But there is no legal compulsion to register land that doesn't meet these transfer criteria, and such land won't be returned in a public search of the Land registry, especially for land that was last transferred before 1990 [1] when the current registration triggers were defined. [Edit] Actually establishing who does own England is a somewhat challenging topic; see [2] for an example of one such attempt, and the list of sources that needed to be consulted. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Land_Registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Land_Registry [1] https://www.gov.uk/registering-land-or-property-with-land-registry https://www.gov.uk/registering-land-or-property-with-land-re... [2] https://map.whoownsengland.org/ https://map.whoownsengland.org/
bennyp101 6y ago
> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege You also get a copy when buying the house, as well as any covenants and details about any fences/walls etc that you have to maintain (either individually or with others) Usually it just gets passed down in the buyer/seller questionnaire - until someone has a falling out with the neighbour then it all goes horribly wrong! But yea, it is strange that we haven't started to do it more accurately, especially for new builds.
- yardie 6y ago
  > it is strange that we haven't started to do it more accurately, especially for new builds. Last time the surveyor came out he found the buried property stacks, dropped his GPS tripod right on top, and that was the property line. This was a house built in the 80s. I'm guessing each county in each state has a method for marking and surveying property.
OldHand2018 6y ago
> Specifically, in England and Wales there's usually no record of the exact boundary between two properties I think that the logical explanation for this is that it just isn't important enough to record the exact boundary between two properties. In the US, most of the land was (dubiously) obtained by the government from the natives, divided into large tracts, sold to land speculators who then divided it into smaller tracts, who then sold it to individuals and families far, far away from the land. The owner then had to go find it. This system pretty much required exact boundaries be known from the start. In the modern US, most land boundaries aren't super important anymore. Want to build a shed in your backyard? Your local zoning rules probably say it has to be 10-15 feet away from the property boundary. If you build it 10-15 feet away from what you think is the property boundary, nobody is going to send in the surveyors to make sure and then tell you to move your shed 1.5 feet to the left. The situations in the US where the exact boundaries are needed are probably the same situations where the exact boundaries are needed in the UK.
- DanBC 6y ago
  Property disputes cause huge amounts of distress and financial cost in England, partly because ownership of boundaries is unclear. Some people spend years and tens of thousands of pounds arguing over that 1 foot strip of land. For the other stuff we have "party wall" laws which help a bit. > Want to build a shed in your backyard? Your local zoning rules probably say it has to be 10-15 feet away from the property boundary. In England you can build a shed right up to the boundary. Potentially you can have bits (like guttering) that overhang the boundary. I think this site is a nice explanation of how complex it can get: https://www.lyonsdavidson.co.uk/can-homeowners-overhanging-eaves-gutters/ https://www.lyonsdavidson.co.uk/can-homeowners-overhanging-e...
  - panzagl 6y ago
    In the US we also have right-of-ways granted to utilities, and while they usually work with you to avoid damage to structures and landscape, they don't have to. There may also be separate mineral rights (if I find gold ore on my property it doesn't belong to me) and water rights (I cannot legally collect the runoff from my roof in a barrel).
tialaramex 6y ago
> I recently looked on US property websites and was surprised that the map showed the exact edge of the property as well as every other property around it The US does not have land registration. So, while it's nice that you got a web site with a map, that's worth almost nothing in court. In contrast the small fee to the Land Registry buys you paperwork that a court of law is compelled to accept as the last word on who owns that land. In the US if you're absolutely sure you own your plot, but alas somebody else has paperwork which they say proves they own it, you're looking at an expensive court case to find out who is right. Which is of course why the US doesn't have a land registry, the lawyers and insurers lobby to ensure they get to keep charging people for the peace of mind that they're not going to wake up to find somebody else owns their home.
- User23 6y ago
  For those curious about how someone else might acquire that paperwork without provable fraud, one way is for someone who doesn’t actually hold title to will it to that someone else. Obviously the dead person can’t be convicted of fraud and the beneficiary can easily claim good faith. In some states adverse possession under color of title[1] like this has a significantly shorter period (7 years instead of 20 for some) before legal ownership can be claimed, presumably because it’s assumed the squatter acted in good faith. I wouldn’t be surprised if UK law is similar. [1] https://wealthhow.com/difference-between-color-of-title-claim-of-right https://wealthhow.com/difference-between-color-of-title-clai...
  - goodcanadian 6y ago
    I am not an expert in any sense, but adverse possession definitely does come from England and originate in common law.
- brianwawok 6y ago
  And this is why most (all) sales in the US include both lender and buyer title insurance. So if some court case comes up, the bank / buyer are protected. 99.999% of sales nothing happens, and the title insurance company gets $800 for doing nothing. Quit the good gig if you ask me.
est31 6y ago
> There are only "title plans" held by HM Land Registry, that may or may not include information about who owns the wall and exactly what delineates the property line. Yeah the UK has been introducing a land registry, but as of 2019, 15% of the land was still not registered. https://hmlandregistry.blog.gov.uk/2019/05/30/registering-land-for-more-than-150-years/ https://hmlandregistry.blog.gov.uk/2019/05/30/registering-la... In continental europe, Napoleon can be attributed to many of the land registries, but England never got conquered by him :).
- arethuza 6y ago
  It's the UK - nothing is that simple. HM Land Registry is for England and Wales, Scotland has its own land registry (indeed a completely separate legal system) and NI does its own thing as well.
arethuza 6y ago
In Scotland if you build a property on someone else's land then they own the property. They are under no obligation to inform you either - so if you decide to build a windmill on top of a hill and then afterwards discover that the hill actually belongs to someone else then you are out of luck!
- kspacewalk2 6y ago
  I think it's a good system. It ensures you as the party that wants to build do your due diligence and/or make sure everyone is on board.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    It can cause a lot of grief if you're lawyer hasn't done all the possible checks as to who owns the land and you find you have been living in a new house that actually belongs to someone else... And people wonder why conveyancing of houses is often so cheap! NB Of course, in such circumstances I'm sure you'd have a valid claim against your solicitor who did the conveyancing - but I doubt if that would make up for the misery involved.
michaelt 6y ago
> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege. I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information. I suspect they're trying to thread the needle between "People's home addresses are private" and "Who owns what land is public" Right now (AFAIK) there isn't any public database I can search to find all the houses owned by Boris Johnson.
- clort 6y ago
  If you are a conveyancing solicitor, you can subscribe to the land registry database and just search it like any other with no need to pay per search, as far as I know. The reason for the payment is that the Land Registry is required to be self funding. Actually I thought that they might have been incorporated as a private company already and sold off but not sure about that.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  I think The IRS does as Boris got hit with tax when his mum died and he got hit with US tax.
SllX 6y ago
> I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information. To cover costs. Accessing those records costs somebody’s time and so unless HM Land Registry eats the cost, the interested party covers the cost. Same reason you pay for passes on government transportation or pay filing fees in court or for a driver’s license.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  In Ontario Canada, we digitized the system and then sold it off to cover a deficit. You can still pay the legislated $6 or whatever for each individual search, but they can slice and dice it and charge whatever they like for useful access to data only they have. Now someone else can make a 10% return on equity at the public’s expense instead of just issuing a bond at 3%. We like to sell off monopolies and maintain them here...
  - chris1993 6y ago
    Australia has the same approach to selling off monopolies. Nice little earners.
wil421 6y ago
I have a survey from my county office that shows everything. It was done by the previous owner but the county retains records. It shows retaining walls, 3 different types of fences, and it includes the different types of property markers they found and where.
fy20 6y ago
Here in Lithuania it's the complete opposite, but given all ownership records are max 30 years old, it makes it a lot easier :-) A lot of GIS data is open to the public (no registration required) such as boundaries and utilities. There's even a mobile app. I am somewhat surprised how much data is open, it even shows you substations. If you wanted to sabotage the electricity supply for an area it would show you how to do it :-) https://regia.lt/map/regia2 https://regia.lt/map/regia2 (Turn on different layers in the menu on mobile)
rgblambda 6y ago
> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege. I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information. HM Land Registry is one of the few government agencies that turns a profit.

by dkarp 6y ago

pmyteh 6y ago

And worse - not all properties are even registered: there's no complete cadastral survey. It's now compulsory to register land on sale, but there are lots of pieces that haven't been sold in decades or centuries. This can result in some quite odd outcomes. The road outside my house, for example, isn't owned by the local council like most roads, but is 'unadopted'. It's probably owned by the descendents of the builder who laid out the road and built the houses in the 1840s, but as it would be a liability rather than an asset (and was probably forgotten about shortly after the last house was sold in any case) nobody knows who that is. There are ways around this. We have specialised title insurance to cover the risk that the road isn't actually a right of way, and there are provisions in English & Welsh law that give responsibility for road maintenance to the frontagers (like me) if the road owner isn't known. But it's added a surprising amount of friction. If there were a 'register or lose it' provision then it's likely something sane could be worked out once the land reverted to the crown. But as it is, we're in this weird semi-purgatory forever. No way of claiming adverse possession over a road, sadly...

moonbug 6y ago
Always seemed odd to me that there's no way to compel a local authority to take ownership and responsibiltiy for an unadopted road.
- pmyteh 6y ago
  AIUI they (often?) will take it over, but only after it's been made up to the same standard that a new road would need to be for them to adopt it. Which is quite the undertaking, especially when you need to persuade each individual frontager to cough up for the building works.
GavinMcG 6y ago
It's not adverse possession, but does your jurisdiction not recognize implied easements? Easements don't change ownership of the underlying land, they just establish a right to use/control the land in a particular way. Road access would (in many jurisdictions) be protected by an easement implied by necessarity (because access is a necessity) or an easement implied by past usage (analogous to adverse possession).
- pmyteh 6y ago
  It does, and it's very likely that we'd eventually win in court if it became an issue. But AIUI, we'd need testimony to 20 years of continuous access as of right to our house (not any of the others on the street). As a newcomer, that's not entirely trivial - the people we bought it from were only here 8 years, and I think we'd need to go another two owners back to get the full 20. And in any case the court case (and inevitable buggeration in the lead up to it) would be expensive and unpleasant. Anyway, the building society (mortgage holder) wanted better security than that, so insurance it is.
  - 7952 6y ago
    I wonder if aerial photos would show cars parked and help prove it.
7952 6y ago
Most roads are actually not owned by the local authority. Adoption means tthey take over responsibility but the freehold remains with the original owner. Title plans are drawn to the assumed highway rather than the original ownership. The definitive information is most likely to be in conveyance documents.

KineticLensman 6y ago

Amazingly the HM Land Registry [0] doesn't actually identify the ownership of all land in the UK. Specifically, land only needs to be registered when it is sold or transferred in certain ways - which puts it on the system, as it were. But there is no legal compulsion to register land that doesn't meet these transfer criteria, and such land won't be returned in a public search of the Land registry, especially for land that was last transferred before 1990 [1] when the current registration triggers were defined. [Edit] Actually establishing who does own England is a somewhat challenging topic; see [2] for an example of one such attempt, and the list of sources that needed to be consulted. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Land_Registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Land_Registry [1] https://www.gov.uk/registering-land-or-property-with-land-registry https://www.gov.uk/registering-land-or-property-with-land-re... [2] https://map.whoownsengland.org/ https://map.whoownsengland.org/

bennyp101 6y ago

> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege You also get a copy when buying the house, as well as any covenants and details about any fences/walls etc that you have to maintain (either individually or with others) Usually it just gets passed down in the buyer/seller questionnaire - until someone has a falling out with the neighbour then it all goes horribly wrong! But yea, it is strange that we haven't started to do it more accurately, especially for new builds.

yardie 6y ago
> it is strange that we haven't started to do it more accurately, especially for new builds. Last time the surveyor came out he found the buried property stacks, dropped his GPS tripod right on top, and that was the property line. This was a house built in the 80s. I'm guessing each county in each state has a method for marking and surveying property.

OldHand2018 6y ago

> Specifically, in England and Wales there's usually no record of the exact boundary between two properties I think that the logical explanation for this is that it just isn't important enough to record the exact boundary between two properties. In the US, most of the land was (dubiously) obtained by the government from the natives, divided into large tracts, sold to land speculators who then divided it into smaller tracts, who then sold it to individuals and families far, far away from the land. The owner then had to go find it. This system pretty much required exact boundaries be known from the start. In the modern US, most land boundaries aren't super important anymore. Want to build a shed in your backyard? Your local zoning rules probably say it has to be 10-15 feet away from the property boundary. If you build it 10-15 feet away from what you think is the property boundary, nobody is going to send in the surveyors to make sure and then tell you to move your shed 1.5 feet to the left. The situations in the US where the exact boundaries are needed are probably the same situations where the exact boundaries are needed in the UK.

DanBC 6y ago
Property disputes cause huge amounts of distress and financial cost in England, partly because ownership of boundaries is unclear. Some people spend years and tens of thousands of pounds arguing over that 1 foot strip of land. For the other stuff we have "party wall" laws which help a bit. > Want to build a shed in your backyard? Your local zoning rules probably say it has to be 10-15 feet away from the property boundary. In England you can build a shed right up to the boundary. Potentially you can have bits (like guttering) that overhang the boundary. I think this site is a nice explanation of how complex it can get: https://www.lyonsdavidson.co.uk/can-homeowners-overhanging-eaves-gutters/ https://www.lyonsdavidson.co.uk/can-homeowners-overhanging-e...
- panzagl 6y ago
  In the US we also have right-of-ways granted to utilities, and while they usually work with you to avoid damage to structures and landscape, they don't have to. There may also be separate mineral rights (if I find gold ore on my property it doesn't belong to me) and water rights (I cannot legally collect the runoff from my roof in a barrel).

tialaramex 6y ago

> I recently looked on US property websites and was surprised that the map showed the exact edge of the property as well as every other property around it The US does not have land registration. So, while it's nice that you got a web site with a map, that's worth almost nothing in court. In contrast the small fee to the Land Registry buys you paperwork that a court of law is compelled to accept as the last word on who owns that land. In the US if you're absolutely sure you own your plot, but alas somebody else has paperwork which they say proves they own it, you're looking at an expensive court case to find out who is right. Which is of course why the US doesn't have a land registry, the lawyers and insurers lobby to ensure they get to keep charging people for the peace of mind that they're not going to wake up to find somebody else owns their home.

User23 6y ago
For those curious about how someone else might acquire that paperwork without provable fraud, one way is for someone who doesn’t actually hold title to will it to that someone else. Obviously the dead person can’t be convicted of fraud and the beneficiary can easily claim good faith. In some states adverse possession under color of title[1] like this has a significantly shorter period (7 years instead of 20 for some) before legal ownership can be claimed, presumably because it’s assumed the squatter acted in good faith. I wouldn’t be surprised if UK law is similar. [1] https://wealthhow.com/difference-between-color-of-title-claim-of-right https://wealthhow.com/difference-between-color-of-title-clai...
- goodcanadian 6y ago
  I am not an expert in any sense, but adverse possession definitely does come from England and originate in common law.
brianwawok 6y ago
And this is why most (all) sales in the US include both lender and buyer title insurance. So if some court case comes up, the bank / buyer are protected. 99.999% of sales nothing happens, and the title insurance company gets $800 for doing nothing. Quit the good gig if you ask me.

est31 6y ago

> There are only "title plans" held by HM Land Registry, that may or may not include information about who owns the wall and exactly what delineates the property line. Yeah the UK has been introducing a land registry, but as of 2019, 15% of the land was still not registered. https://hmlandregistry.blog.gov.uk/2019/05/30/registering-land-for-more-than-150-years/ https://hmlandregistry.blog.gov.uk/2019/05/30/registering-la... In continental europe, Napoleon can be attributed to many of the land registries, but England never got conquered by him :).

arethuza 6y ago
It's the UK - nothing is that simple. HM Land Registry is for England and Wales, Scotland has its own land registry (indeed a completely separate legal system) and NI does its own thing as well.

arethuza 6y ago

In Scotland if you build a property on someone else's land then they own the property. They are under no obligation to inform you either - so if you decide to build a windmill on top of a hill and then afterwards discover that the hill actually belongs to someone else then you are out of luck!

kspacewalk2 6y ago
I think it's a good system. It ensures you as the party that wants to build do your due diligence and/or make sure everyone is on board.
- arethuza 6y ago
  It can cause a lot of grief if you're lawyer hasn't done all the possible checks as to who owns the land and you find you have been living in a new house that actually belongs to someone else... And people wonder why conveyancing of houses is often so cheap! NB Of course, in such circumstances I'm sure you'd have a valid claim against your solicitor who did the conveyancing - but I doubt if that would make up for the misery involved.

michaelt 6y ago

> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege. I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information. I suspect they're trying to thread the needle between "People's home addresses are private" and "Who owns what land is public" Right now (AFAIK) there isn't any public database I can search to find all the houses owned by Boris Johnson.

clort 6y ago
If you are a conveyancing solicitor, you can subscribe to the land registry database and just search it like any other with no need to pay per search, as far as I know. The reason for the payment is that the Land Registry is required to be self funding. Actually I thought that they might have been incorporated as a private company already and sold off but not sure about that.
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
I think The IRS does as Boris got hit with tax when his mum died and he got hit with US tax.

SllX 6y ago

> I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information. To cover costs. Accessing those records costs somebody’s time and so unless HM Land Registry eats the cost, the interested party covers the cost. Same reason you pay for passes on government transportation or pay filing fees in court or for a driver’s license.

Scoundreller 6y ago
In Ontario Canada, we digitized the system and then sold it off to cover a deficit. You can still pay the legislated $6 or whatever for each individual search, but they can slice and dice it and charge whatever they like for useful access to data only they have. Now someone else can make a 10% return on equity at the public’s expense instead of just issuing a bond at 3%. We like to sell off monopolies and maintain them here...
- chris1993 6y ago
  Australia has the same approach to selling off monopolies. Nice little earners.

wil421 6y ago

I have a survey from my county office that shows everything. It was done by the previous owner but the county retains records. It shows retaining walls, 3 different types of fences, and it includes the different types of property markers they found and where.

fy20 6y ago

Here in Lithuania it's the complete opposite, but given all ownership records are max 30 years old, it makes it a lot easier :-) A lot of GIS data is open to the public (no registration required) such as boundaries and utilities. There's even a mobile app. I am somewhat surprised how much data is open, it even shows you substations. If you wanted to sabotage the electricity supply for an area it would show you how to do it :-) https://regia.lt/map/regia2 https://regia.lt/map/regia2 (Turn on different layers in the menu on mobile)

rgblambda 6y ago

> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege. I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information. HM Land Registry is one of the few government agencies that turns a profit.