For journalists and researchers: the underlying data is HM Land Registry CCOD (UK-incorporated proprietors) and OCOD (overseas), published monthly under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Cite the publisher, the dataset, and the publication month. The registers show registered ownership, never beneficial ownership — that distinction belongs in the piece, not just in your notes.
What this data supports
Corporate ownership data is unusually well suited to public-interest reporting because it is comprehensive within its scope, official, and free to reuse. It reliably supports questions such as:
- Which corporate entities hold land in a given area, and how concentrated that holding is.
- How a named company's portfolio is distributed across districts, counties and regions.
- Whether a site's registered owner is a UK or an overseas entity, and where an overseas proprietor is incorporated.
- When a proprietor was registered, which supports a chronology of acquisition.
- The tenure mix across a portfolio or an area.
Those are all answerable from the published record, and all reproducible by anyone who repeats the method.
What it does not support
Every one of these has appeared as an overstated claim in published work, and each is worth checking against your draft before filing.
| Claim you may want to make | Why the data cannot support it |
|---|---|
| "X ultimately owns this property" | The register names the registered proprietor. A nominee, trustee or SPV appears identically to a beneficial owner |
| "The property is worth £N" or "was bought for £N" | Price paid is recorded only where captured, is blank on many rows, may reflect intra-group or nominal consideration, and is historic — never a valuation |
| "X owns N properties" | Titles are not properties. One title can cover many addresses; one building can carry many titles. State which unit you are counting |
| "X owns no property" | A nil return is consistent with unregistered land, individual ownership, an overseas entity in OCOD, a former company name, a subsidiary, or a recent unpublished transfer |
| "X acquired this in [year]" | The date field is a registration date, which lags completion and can reset on administrative changes |
| "The property is mortgaged to Y" | Charges are on the title register, not in the ownership datasets |
| "This covers the whole UK" | England and Wales only. Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate registers |
The most common single error is conflating registered and beneficial ownership. It is also the most consequential, because it can attribute an asset to a party who has no economic interest in it. The safe formulation is precise and still perfectly readable: "the registered proprietor is X" rather than "X owns".
How to cite correctly
A complete citation has four parts:
- Publisher — HM Land Registry.
- Dataset — Commercial and Corporate Ownership Data (CCOD), or Overseas Companies Ownership Data (OCOD). Say which; they are different populations.
- Publication month of the file you used. The datasets are republished monthly, so without the month your figures cannot be reproduced or checked.
- Licence — Open Government Licence v3.0.
Where you have combined sources, name each. Company and officer details come from Companies House; insolvency and corporate notices from The Gazette; beneficial ownership of overseas entities from the Register of Overseas Entities at Companies House. Our processing steps are documented in the data methodology if you need to describe the pipeline your figures passed through.
Reproducibility
Editors and peer reviewers will ask how a figure was produced. Record these as you work:
- The publication month of the dataset.
- The exact search terms, including whether you searched by number or by name — the two produce different result sets for good reasons.
- The entity list, if you aggregated across a group, and how you established it.
- Your de-duplication rule — almost always de-duplicate on title number.
- Your counting unit — titles or addresses.
- Which matches you discarded and why, since name matching is tolerant and will return candidates that fail identity checks.
Exporting to CSV at the point of research gives you a fixed snapshot to work from, which matters because a re-run after the next monthly refresh will legitimately produce different numbers.
Next step
Run and export a search
Search by company, director or address and export the matched titles as CSV or JSON for analysis.
Regional and aggregate analysis
The district, county and region fields make area-level aggregation straightforward, but two cautions apply. Administrative boundaries as recorded may lag local-government reorganisation, so a district name may not match current boundaries. And titles carrying the multiple-address flag will distort any per-area count, since one such title can represent an entire estate.
For comparative work, normalise. A raw count of corporate titles by district mostly measures how much built environment a district has. Expressing holdings per head of population, per hectare, or as a share of that district's total corporate titles produces a figure that means something. The approach is discussed in where corporate ownership is most concentrated.
Corrections
We do not hold the source records and cannot amend the register. Corrections to title or proprietor data have to come from HM Land Registry; corrections to company or officer data from Companies House. If you believe we have processed or presented something incorrectly, or you need methodology detail for a citation, get in touch via the details on our about page.
Where to go next
- Data methodology and refresh schedule
- CCOD data explained
- Bulk property data export
- Overseas companies owning property in England and Wales
Frequently asked questions
Can I use this data in a published article?
The underlying HM Land Registry datasets are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits reuse including publication provided you attribute the source. Check the current licence terms directly with HM Land Registry, since commercial and non-commercial reuse are treated differently, and attribute HM Land Registry as the source of the ownership records.
How should I cite corporate ownership data?
Cite HM Land Registry as the publisher, name the dataset (CCOD for UK-incorporated proprietors, OCOD for overseas), state the publication month of the file you used, and note the Open Government Licence. Because the datasets are republished monthly, the month is the part most often omitted and the part that makes your figures reproducible.
Can you confirm who beneficially owns a property?
No, and no dataset can. The registers record the legal proprietor. Where the proprietor is a nominee, trustee or SPV, the beneficial owner is not disclosed by the ownership data. For overseas entities, the Register of Overseas Entities at Companies House is the appropriate additional source.
Do you provide data extracts for research?
Search results can be exported as CSV or JSON directly from the tool, which covers most research needs. The source datasets are also available directly from HM Land Registry if you want the complete monthly files to work with yourself.