Overview
- Free Land Registry Commercial Titles Search
- Find out what property a company owns
- Find associated ‘interests’ at an address
What is the MRT?
Vision
How To Use / Tutorial Video Transcription
The benefits of the MRT is
- Being able to search Land Registry commercial titles for free
- Able to search by company and see what properties they own
- Searching by an address and seeing what hits that address gets from other associated parties
Login / Registration Page
This is the login page and you need to register to use the tool, click the “Need to Register” button If you want any further information and tutorials, click this button and it will take you to this page.
Postcode and Door Number Example
For this example we are going to look at who owns the Shard in London. So from their website I can see and address so will copy the postcode and enter that into the postcode section in the MRT and hit search. Just note I’ve edited searches down as they usually take 20-60 seconds each.
The postcode search will look for properties at that postcode
Here you can see that it found 31 results which includes any building with that postcode. The Shard is at #32 so we will enter that into Flat # or Door # or Street name.
We hit search and get 6 results
So if we scroll along, we can see the companies that have ownership.
Company Registration Number
Then with can take Costar UK Limited company number, which is the company number registered at companies house and put into Company Registration number and see any commercial property it owns.
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/
Hit the reset button first to clear any search information
We can see it owns 4 properties as per the Property Address field. By clicking on County we can sort by county.
We can then look at the Proprietor Address and see what other properties might be registered to this address. Here we will search by 1 Chapel Place
Sort by District and see a number of results.
We can see here that the Proprietorship Category is largely a Corporate Body.
Proprietor Search
In this next example we are going to search to see what properties Sainsbury owns. Enter “Sainsbury” into the Proprietor Name, and hit search
This will then give us over 2000 properties
We can sort by district.
And in this search field we can filter down to see the properties in Barnet by entering Barnet … and see that we get 31 properties in Barnet
Sometimes if you can’t see the horizontal scroll bar because there are too many results, click and drag your mouse to the right and you’ll be able to scroll to the right.
The same will work in the other direction
Residential Postcode Search
If you enter a residential postcode, you’ll be able to see if there are any entities that own residential properties. This postcode is purely residential 2 bed victorian terraces.
As you’ll see form the Proprietor name and category, this will pick up various bodies including councils and local authorities.
Feedback
At the bottom of each page is a button to leave feedback. If you pick up something not working, click the button and entering in details.
You can also use the same button to make any suggestions, improvements or additional data that would be really helpful to you. This is only a 0.1 release and we have a lot of additional things to add in on the roadmap. Feedback will help prioritize the build sequence
The searches are by default set to a broad “contains” search. This can be made more restrictive by using the “match exactly” option. The reset button will set these back to default.
Search the entire database – Title
“Search the entire database” is a very broad search. You can do a title search here. You might have a freeholder lease which will give the title numbers of the leaseholder leases. Using these title numbers you can see who the leaseholder is.
In this case, it was Sainbury.
3rd Party Interests
Here we demonstrate 3rd party interests. We’ve chosen a couple of random managing agents from a Google search.
By getting there address from their website, we’ve searched the database to see what interest pop up. Here there are 6 results but 2 of those is the building themselves.
Here is a 2nd random company and this address comes back with 581 matches. By comparing these two managing agents, you can start to get a sense as to the scale of each.
Concluding
That was a quick overview of the Massive Research Tool (MRT). This is a 0.1 version release so very much in its infancy and would love to hear any feedback, suggestions and other data you’d like to see included.
Always happy to talk PropTech so you can reach out to me at matt@mattelder.com
If you know of anyone else who might be interested in this app, feel free to point them to www.mrtool.co.uk
Ultimately the goal is to make the purchase of property a 1 click process.
Cheers.