What it is: CCOD is HM Land Registry's monthly dataset of registered titles in England and Wales held by UK-incorporated companies and corporate bodies. Each row links a title to its registered proprietor. It is an ownership index — excellent for finding out who holds what, silent on charges, boundaries, lease terms and beneficial ownership.
What CCOD is, and where it comes from
Commercial and Corporate Ownership Data is published by HM Land Registry as part of its open data programme. It exists because the register itself is organised by title: to find out who owns a property you look up that property. There was no way to run the question in reverse — to start from a company and ask what it owns — until the ownership data was released in bulk.
The dataset covers England and Wales only. Scotland is registered by Registers of Scotland and Northern Ireland by Land and Property Services, both entirely separate systems with their own access arrangements and data products.
It also covers only registered land. Compulsory first registration has been extended progressively over decades and now catches most transactions, but land that has not changed hands or been mortgaged in a very long time may still be unregistered — and unregistered land appears in no dataset at all.
CCOD and OCOD
There are two companion datasets, split by where the owner is incorporated:
- CCOD — proprietors incorporated in the UK: limited companies, PLCs, LLPs, local authorities, housing associations, and other corporate bodies.
- OCOD — proprietors incorporated outside the UK. Structurally near-identical, with an added country incorporated field.
The split matters in practice: searching only CCOD for a property you suspect is held offshore will return nothing, and that nil return says nothing about whether the property is corporately owned. Complete coverage means checking both.
Field-by-field reference
Column names vary slightly between releases, but the substance is stable.
| Field | What it holds | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Title Number | The unique identifier of the registered title | The stable primary key. Use it to de-duplicate results and to order official copies. Not sequential and carries no geographic meaning |
| Tenure | Freehold or Leasehold | Describes the registered interest, not the building. The same physical unit can have both a freehold and a leasehold title, held by different parties |
| Property Address | The address as recorded on the title | Register text, not a normalised postal address. Expect inconsistent formatting, and descriptive entries such as "land on the north side of…" with no street number |
| District / County / Region | Administrative geography | Useful for aggregation. Reflects boundaries as recorded, which may lag local-government reorganisation |
| Postcode | Postcode where held | Frequently blank for land parcels without a postal delivery point. Absence does not imply an error |
| Multiple Address Indicator | Flag for titles covering more than one address | Critical for counting. A flagged title may represent many units, so "number of titles" and "number of properties" are different figures |
| Price Paid | Consideration, where recorded | Sparse. Populated only where a price was captured on registration, typically for later transfers. Blank means "not recorded", never "no consideration". Not a valuation |
| Date Proprietor Added | When the current proprietor was entered on the register | A reasonable proxy for acquisition date, but it is a registration date and lags completion. Also resets on some administrative changes |
| Proprietor Name (1–4) | Registered proprietor names | Up to four per title. The name as at registration — a later rename does not update the title automatically |
| Company Registration No. (1–4) | Companies House number per proprietor | The reliable identifier. Preserve leading zeros. Sometimes blank for non-company corporate bodies such as local authorities |
| Proprietorship Category (1–4) | Type of corporate proprietor | Distinguishes limited companies from local authorities, housing associations, corporate bodies and similar. A quick sanity check on whether a name match is the right kind of entity |
| Proprietor Address (1–3, per proprietor) | Addresses recorded for each proprietor | Often the registered office at the time of registration, sometimes a solicitor's or agent's address. Useful corroboration, not authoritative for current contact details |
| Country Incorporated (OCOD) | Jurisdiction of incorporation | OCOD only. The starting point for any question about offshore holding structures |
| Additional Proprietor Indicator | Flag for more proprietors than the columns hold | Signals that the four proprietor slots do not tell the whole story and the register should be consulted |
Next step
Query the dataset directly
Search indexed CCOD and OCOD records by company name, number, director, or address without downloading and parsing the monthly files.
The three fields most often misread
Price paid is not a valuation
It is a historic consideration figure, recorded only where it was captured at registration. It is blank for a large share of rows, and where present it may reflect a transfer at other than market value — an intra-group reorganisation, a transfer for nominal consideration, or a portfolio deal apportioned across many titles. Never present it as current value, and never infer from a blank that the property changed hands for nothing.
Tenure describes the interest, not the asset
A leasehold row does not mean "a flat" and a freehold row does not mean "a house". A single building routinely has one freehold title and many leasehold titles over parts of it. If a company appears with a leasehold title over a whole retail park, it is the tenant of a long lease, not the landowner — a materially different position.
Date proprietor added is a registration date
It is when the register was updated, not when the deal completed. The gap is usually weeks but can be longer for complex applications. For chronology-sensitive work — establishing what a party owned on a particular date — that gap matters, and the register is the better source.
What the dataset does not contain
The omissions are as important as the contents, because the most costly errors come from assuming a field exists:
- Charges and mortgages. No lender security, no restrictions, no notices.
- Beneficial ownership. Only the registered proprietor. A nominee or corporate trustee looks exactly like an owner.
- Boundaries. No plan and no extent. The title plan is a separate document.
- Lease detail. No term, rent, review or break provisions.
- Covenants and easements. Substantive title matters live on the register.
- Individual owners. Property held by private persons is outside the dataset by design.
- Short leases. Interests not requiring registration — broadly those of seven years or less — do not appear.
- Unregistered land. Not in any register, therefore not in any dataset.
The dividing line between the dataset and the official register is set out in CCOD vs the title register. The short version: CCOD tells you which titles to look at; the register tells you what is on them.
Working with the raw files
If you download the monthly release yourself, budget for the following:
- Scale. The files are large enough that a spreadsheet is the wrong tool. Expect to load them into a database.
- Normalisation. Company numbers arrive with inconsistent padding, spacing and punctuation; names carry suffix variants. Matching without normalising both produces false negatives.
- Wide-to-long reshaping. Up to four proprietors are held across repeated column groups. Most analytical questions are easier after pivoting to one row per proprietor per title.
- Encoding and malformed rows. Address free-text includes characters that break naive CSV parsing.
- Joining CCOD to OCOD. Similar but not identical schemas; align the columns explicitly rather than concatenating.
Our own approach to loading, normalising and indexing these files is documented in the data methodology.
Where to go next
- How to read title number, tenure and proprietor address correctly
- Data methodology and refresh schedule
- Company property search UK
- Overseas companies owning property in England and Wales
Frequently asked questions
What does CCOD stand for?
CCOD stands for Commercial and Corporate Ownership Data. It is a dataset published by HM Land Registry listing registered titles in England and Wales whose proprietor is a UK-incorporated company or other corporate body, rather than a private individual.
What is the difference between CCOD and OCOD?
CCOD covers titles held by UK-incorporated companies and corporate bodies. OCOD — Overseas Companies Ownership Data — covers titles held by companies incorporated outside the UK and adds a country-of-incorporation field. They are published as separate datasets on the same monthly cycle, so a complete ownership picture usually requires both.
Is CCOD data free?
HM Land Registry publishes CCOD for download under licence terms you must accept, and it is free to access. Reuse is governed by those terms, which distinguish between non-commercial and commercial use, so check the current licence before republishing or building a commercial product on it.
How often is CCOD updated?
It is republished monthly. Note that publication cadence is not the same as currency: a transfer has to be registered before it can appear, and registration itself lags completion, so recent transactions may be absent from an otherwise current file.
Does CCOD show mortgages or charges?
No. Charges, restrictions, covenants and the detailed proprietorship entry appear on the official title register, which is a separate per-title document. CCOD is an ownership index, not a substitute for the register.