Corporate & overseas land ownership
Who owns England’s cities?Follow the land, not just the map.
Behind every site is an owner — and increasingly that owner is a company registered in Jersey, the British Virgin Islands or Guernsey rather than a person on the street. This explorer surfaces the corporate and overseas ownership recorded by HM Land Registry, district by district, and ties it straight into the planning constraints that decide what can be built there.
Real HM Land Registry data
Real HM Land Registry data (CCOD + OCOD, October 2026) covering 2,785 postcode districts across England and Wales. Companies and organisations only; private individuals are never included.
4,566,444
Corporate titles indexed
across 2785 postcode districts
2%
Owned via overseas companies
90,625 titles
946,557
Distinct owning entities
£762.8bn
Recorded price paid
where a value is on the register
Where the overseas owners are registered
Of the overseas-owned titles in this dataset, here is how they split by the company’s country of incorporation. A handful of Crown Dependencies and offshore centres account for the overwhelming majority — the same pattern the national register shows.
Most overseas-owned postcode districts
Ranked by the share of indexed corporate titles held through an overseas company. Open any district for the full owner list and to run a planning-constraints check on an address there.
Districts with the most corporate-owned land
Why ownership + constraints, together?
Ownership tells you who holds the land. Planning constraints tell you what can happen on it. Put side by side, they answer the questions that actually move deals and objections:
- ·Which companies control the parcels around a development site — and are any of them offshore?
- ·Is the site behind that planning application owned by a local firm or a shell company?
- ·For a street you’re assembling, who are the freeholders and how do I reach them?
- ·Does the conservation area or flood zone sit on land held by one dominant owner?
That combination — Land Registry ownership layered onto planning constraints, mapping and analysis — is what makes this a value-added product rather than a re-publish of the register.
Try it now
Check a real address for free
Run any England or Wales address through the constraints checker — conservation areas, flood zones, listed buildings and 130 other datasets — then see the corporate-ownership picture for that postcode alongside it.
Open the checkerMethod & sources
Ownership is drawn from HM Land Registry’s corporate (CCOD) and overseas (OCOD) ownership datasets and aggregated by postcode district. HM Land Registry does not publish a link between title numbers and mapped land parcels, so this is a district-level screening indicator, not a title-plan boundary. We show the owning company, its jurisdiction, category and holding counts — not exact property addresses (their use is licence-restricted). Private individuals are never included; these datasets cover companies and organisations only.
Source: Source: HM Land Registry — UK companies (CCOD) and overseas companies (OCOD) that own property in England and Wales. Information produced by HM Land Registry. © Crown copyright 2026 Data as at October 2026.
Note: Corporate ownership reflects HM Land Registry’s record of the current registered proprietor and can lag transactions by weeks or months. Ownership is matched to a location by postcode, not by title-plan boundary, so treat it as a screening indicator — always confirm with an official copy of the register before relying on it.
Conditions of use: This ownership information is licensed to us by HM Land Registry, and its conditions apply to you as well as to us. Use it for your own research and decisions. You must not use it for direct marketing of any kind — including contacting registered proprietors to offer goods or services — and you must not extract or redistribute the underlying HM Land Registry data as a standalone dataset or product. Full terms.
HMLR CCOD + OCOD · October 2026 · 4,566,444 titles · 2,785 districts