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Understanding ownership data

Planning Constraints includes land ownership information sourced from HM Land Registry's CCOD and OCOD datasets. This page explains exactly what that is, what it isn't, and the rules that govern how it can be used.

What CCOD and OCOD are​

  • CCOD (Corporate and Commercial Ownership Data) — titles owned by UK companies and other corporate bodies.
  • OCOD (Overseas Companies Ownership Data) — titles owned by companies registered outside the UK.

Both are published by HM Land Registry and updated monthly. This coverage is national across England (and Wales, since CCOD includes Welsh titles, though this product surfaces England only).

Corporate and overseas owners only — never private individuals​

This is the single most important fact about this data: CCOD and OCOD only ever record corporate and overseas company ownership. A private individual who owns their own home, or a family-owned freehold, will never appear. If you search a district and find nothing, that most likely means the land there is owned by individuals — not that the data is missing or incomplete. A district with no matching title is a genuine "nothing here," not a gap.

What you'll see, and what you won't​

For a title that appears, you can see the registered company name and the postcode district it falls in. You will never see:

  • A property address. HM Land Registry's licence for this data restricts the display of property addresses (they're cross-referenced against Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey address data, which carries its own restriction for a company like ours). We deliberately never show property addresses anywhere ownership data appears — aggregates and owner names only.
  • Any private individual's name or details. These datasets structurally only ever contain corporate and overseas entities.

You may not use this data to contact owners​

HM Land Registry's licence expressly prohibits using this data for direct marketing — that means you may not use anything you see here (a company name, a title count, a district summary) to contact a registered proprietor to offer them goods or services. This isn't a Planning Constraints house rule we could relax; it's a condition of the licence the data is published under, and it applies to every user of the product regardless of plan. If your intended use is prospecting for landowners to approach directly, this data source cannot be used for that.

Where you'll find it in the app​

  • On a company portfolio page (/company/[registration number]), which shows a company's Companies House status alongside the titles it holds and which districts they're in.
  • On an ownership area page, showing aggregated title counts for a postcode district.
  • Through a district watch, which alerts you when a company acquires or disposes of titles in a district you're monitoring, and optionally when a company holding titles there has a Companies House filing (a charge or a strike-off notice) — see What is a watch?.

Freshness​

HM Land Registry publishes CCOD and OCOD once a month. Every place this data appears states the month it covers, so you're never looking at a stale figure presented as current.

Attribution​

Wherever this data is shown, you'll see HM Land Registry's required attribution line. This is a licence condition, not decoration, and it's never removed — including on white-labelled Practice portals, where product branding is removed but data attributions never are.