Most useful property leads in England & Wales already sit in three official datasets: HM Land Registry, Companies House and The Gazette - with Ordnance Survey providing the spatial layer that ties them together. None of this needs scraping. None of it is in a grey area. The challenge is not access; it is asking the right questions of the data and being honest about what it can and can't tell you.
This piece walks through what each register holds, how it connects to the others, and where the realistic limits sit. As ever: property and ownership data is England & Wales, company and insolvency data is UK-wide, and signals are indicators, not facts.
HM Land Registry: who owns what
The Land Registry holds the official record of registered land in England and Wales. The pieces most relevant to sourcing:
- The registered proprietor (a person or, more often for commercial property, a company) and the date they were registered.
- The title plan, which defines the extent of ownership.
- The price-paid history for transactions since 2000.
- Any registered charges, including the chargee (typically a bank) and the date.
Two practical signals fall straight out of this. First, long-tenure corporate freeholds - 15 years or more under the same proprietor - are a useful proxy for succession risk, particularly when paired with director age or single-director status at Companies House. Second, a new charge registered against a long-held property can indicate refinancing pressure or capital raised against the asset.
What it cannot tell you: occupancy, condition, rent passing, or intent. Those need other inputs.
Companies House: who is behind the proprietor
For company-owned properties - which is most commercial stock - Companies House is the second half of the story:
- Annual accounts (or their absence): late or overdue accounts are a leading distress indicator.
- Charges: every secured borrowing is filed here, with the chargee and date.
- Officers: directors, secretaries and Persons with Significant Control. Director resignations, single-director structures, and PSC changes all matter.
- SIC codes: a rough proxy for what the company does, and therefore what the building is likely used for.
Cross-referencing helps. A property held by a company with overdue accounts and a recent floating charge is a different prospect from one held by a fully compliant trading company with no recent secured borrowing.
The Gazette: insolvency and receivership in public
The Gazette is the official journal of record in the UK. For property sourcing the relevant notices are:
- Appointment of administrators or LPA receivers.
- Winding-up petitions and orders.
- Notices of intention to dissolve.
These are dated, named, and unambiguous. A Gazette notice naming a receiver against a specific property is one of the clearest 'live counterparty' signals in commercial property.
Ordnance Survey and the spatial layer
HM Land Registry titles are polygons on a map. To do anything useful with them at scale you need a spatial backbone - building footprints, road frontages, land-use boundaries. Ordnance Survey provides this under the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement and is the standard reference set used by local authorities and most professional valuers.
Two things this unlocks: joining a Land Registry title to the physical building (or buildings) on it, and deriving simple structural features - corner plots, frontages, plot ratio - that affect optionality.
How to combine them without overclaiming
A useful working model:
- Use Companies House to find the owner companies showing pressure signs.
- Use the Land Registry to find the properties they own and the charges over them.
- Use The Gazette to find the moments when a third party (a receiver or administrator) takes control.
- Use Ordnance Survey to put it on a map and screen for the physical attributes you care about.
That gives you a short, dated, ranked list. It does not give you certainty. Owners recover. Receivers refinance instead of selling. EPCs get upgraded. Treat every output as a candidate, not a conclusion.
What to avoid
- Scraped consumer data. It is unlawful and the lists are usually wrong.
- Distressed lists sold without sources. If you cannot trace a signal to a dated public record, you cannot defend the outreach.
- Indicative valuations dressed up as RICS valuations. Comparable-based estimates from price-paid data are useful for triage and indicative pricing only.
Why this matters
The professional market already uses these registers. Built carefully, the same inputs let a smaller buyer compete on quality of approach rather than volume - reaching the right owner, with a credible offer, before the asset reaches a portal.