What the data supports: OCOD lets you analyse overseas corporate ownership by region, county and district, and by country of incorporation. What it does not support is treating incorporation as nationality, or reading raw title counts as a measure of concentration. For beneficial ownership, the Register of Overseas Entities is the companion source.
Two datasets, one question
HM Land Registry splits corporate ownership into two monthly files by where the proprietor is incorporated:
- CCOD — UK-incorporated proprietors.
- OCOD — proprietors incorporated outside the UK, with an added country incorporated field.
The split has a practical consequence people run into constantly: search only CCOD for a property you suspect is held offshore and you get nothing, and that nil return tells you nothing about whether the property is corporately held. Any question about overseas ownership starts with OCOD, and any question about total corporate ownership needs both.
What makes regional analysis possible
Every row carries administrative geography — district, county and region — alongside the title, tenure, proprietor and country of incorporation. That combination is what allows the dataset to answer questions like "how much overseas corporate ownership is there in this district, and where are those entities registered?"
Three fields do the work:
| Field | Enables | Caution |
|---|---|---|
| Region / county / district | Geographic aggregation at three levels | Names reflect boundaries as recorded and may lag local-government reorganisation |
| Country incorporated | Breakdown by jurisdiction of the holding vehicle | Not the nationality of the investor — see below |
| Date proprietor added | Chronology of when holdings were registered | A registration date, lagging completion |
The four analytical errors to avoid
1. Reading incorporation as nationality
A company incorporated in Jersey is a Jersey company. That is a fact about the vehicle, not about who owns it. Holding structures are chosen for legal, tax and financing reasons, and it is entirely ordinary for a vehicle registered in one jurisdiction to be owned by investors based somewhere completely different — sometimes including the UK itself.
So "properties held by companies incorporated in X" is a defensible statement. "Properties owned by X-based investors" is not, and the two are routinely conflated in published analysis.
2. Using raw title counts as concentration
A raw count of overseas-held titles by district largely measures how much registered built environment that district has. Big urban districts will top any raw ranking, which is uninformative. To say something meaningful, normalise — overseas-held titles as a share of all corporate-held titles in that district is usually the most interpretable measure. The general approach is discussed in where corporate ownership is most concentrated.
3. Ignoring the title-to-property mismatch
One title can cover an entire estate, flagged by the multiple-address indicator. One building can carry a freehold plus many leasehold titles. So counting titles and counting properties give different answers, and mixing tenure layers double-counts the same physical asset at different levels. Filter to freehold before making claims about how much land is held.
4. Treating price paid as value
It is sparse, historic, and where a portfolio was acquired in one transaction may be apportioned oddly across titles. Summing it produces a number that looks authoritative and means very little. It is not a valuation of anything.
Next step
Search overseas ownership records
Query indexed CCOD and OCOD records together by company, address or region, and export the results.
The Register of Overseas Entities
This is the piece that changes what is answerable, and it is worth understanding alongside OCOD.
The Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 created a Register of Overseas Entities at Companies House. Overseas entities that hold, or wish to hold, qualifying UK property must register and declare their beneficial owners, and registration is tied to the ability to deal with the land.
The consequence for analysis is a genuine asymmetry, and it runs the opposite way to most people's assumption:
- For an overseas corporate owner, you have OCOD for the property and the Register of Overseas Entities for the beneficial owners.
- For a UK corporate owner, you have CCOD for the property and only the PSC register — which reaches control of the company, not beneficial ownership of the land, and is subject to exemptions.
So a Jersey-held property can be more transparent as to who ultimately benefits than an equivalent asset held by an English SPV holding on trust. That is a genuinely useful thing to know when planning an investigation, and it is the opposite of the intuition that offshore means opaque.
A defensible regional analysis
- Fix the dataset month. OCOD republishes monthly; without the month your figures are not reproducible.
- Decide the unit — titles, addresses, or freehold titles only — and state it.
- De-duplicate on title number.
- Filter tenure so you are not counting the same building at freehold and leasehold level.
- Aggregate by region, county or district as appropriate to the claim.
- Normalise against a denominator — all corporate titles in the district is usually best.
- Break down by country incorporated, describing it as jurisdiction of the vehicle.
- Reconcile boundary names if joining to external area data.
- State the caveats — registered not beneficial ownership, registration lag, England and Wales only, no unregistered land.
Citation conventions for published work are in press and data requests.
What the structure of the data tells you
Even without asserting figures, a few things follow from how the dataset is built and are worth keeping in mind when interpreting any regional breakdown:
- Overseas holdings skew toward higher-value commercial assets, because the cost of establishing and maintaining an offshore structure only makes sense above a certain asset value. Expect the pattern to concentrate where high-value commercial property is, rather than being evenly spread.
- Leasehold rows in OCOD often represent long investment leases rather than occupation, so tenure needs reading carefully.
- Multiple-address titles matter disproportionately at the top of any ranking, because a single title can be an entire estate.
- Country-of-incorporation distributions cluster in a small number of jurisdictions with established property-holding regimes — which reflects the availability of legal structures, not the geography of capital.
Read next
Frequently asked questions
What is OCOD data?
OCOD is Overseas Companies Ownership Data, published monthly by HM Land Registry. It records registered titles in England and Wales whose proprietor is a company incorporated outside the UK, and adds a country-of-incorporation field that CCOD does not have. It is a separate file from CCOD, so a complete ownership picture requires both.
Can I find out who is behind an overseas company that owns UK property?
Often, yes — and more readily than for a domestic structure. The Register of Overseas Entities at Companies House, introduced by the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022, requires overseas entities holding UK property to register their beneficial owners. OCOD identifies the entity; the register speaks to who is behind it.
Does country of incorporation tell you where the owner is really based?
No. It tells you where the company is registered, which is a legal fact about the vehicle rather than a statement about where its investors are. Vehicles are commonly incorporated in one jurisdiction for legal or tax reasons while the ultimate owners are somewhere else entirely, so treating incorporation as nationality is a serious analytical error.