FinderMonkey - Unregistered Land Services
With more and more people making improvements to a property rather than trying to make the jump to a larger more expensive home, there has been an increased number of people wondering, who owns that land at the back of my house? Well the interesting this is, if you live in the United Kingdom, it could be the Queen!
Unregistered land is not ownerless land as some would lead you to believe it is simply land that has not been registered with the land registry. This means that there will be no title register or title plan for the land/property held with Land Registry.
If you are thinking of using or buying a piece of land you first need to perform a Title Register Search, this can be done by a number of companies including ones that offer an online services. If the land is registered the document will come back with the owner and you can contact them to arrange if you can use or buy the land.
If the land is not registered with Land registry and over a third of all land in England and Wales is not then you then have two choices.
• Use the land and see if anyone reacts
• Try and find the current owner
An example of someone using the land without the knowledge of the owner is a man who lives in an end terrace house; he has no back garden and a small front yard. He would like a garden but cannot afford to move. To the side of the property is a patch of grass, this grass is not used for anything so he puts a fence around the grass and uses it as a garden. No one complains and the family in the next row do the same.
This is quite common and unless you have interfering neighbours no one usually minds. In the given example which did happen, the gentleman later found out that the terrace houses was built for staff of a closed down brick works, the brick works had owned the patch of grass but as they were no longer a trading company the ownership of the land had gone back to The Crown (as it always does). The Crown had sold the main piece of land where the brickworks had stood to a property developer, this land was now registered, the houses had long ago been bought by, firstly the brick works staff and then by a succession of people so they were all registered, as for the patch of grass – it was never sold to the property developer so technically it is still in ownership of the Crown but as far as they are concerned the Brickworks land was sold and the case had been filed.
You can see from this how small pieces of land do get overlooked on a regular basis. The really strange thing is technically speaking, the owner of the land was The Crown aka The Queen!
Buckingham, Balmoral and a small patch of grass in Leeds
Does the Queen own land near you? It’s more than likely to be true, tracing the owners of unregistered land is hard but can be very interesting. Good Luck with your search
