Finding the Owner of a Block of Flats

How to find out who owns a block of flats

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Overview

It is quite often the case that the owner of a flat needs to find the owner of the block of flats within which his flat is located. This might be because he needs to contact the owner for permission to do something, to contact the owner to complain about something, to pay a ground rent, or to negotiate a lease extension.

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Property Tenures

All flats are leasehold properties. The lease terms are governed by a Lease. All leasehold properties have a corresponding freehold title, owned by someone else. The freeholder is the landlord of the leasehold property, and the leaseholder is the tenant. The property may be sold to you either by the freeholder, if it is an original Lease, or by a leaseholder, if it is not an original Lease.

Sometimes the lease is an underlease, in which case the leaseholder actually needs to contact the superior leaseholder rather than the freeholder. This will be the case, for example, where a developer sells a number of large plots of land to a number of builders who in turner sub-divide their land into building plots. The builders are the superior leaseholders and the flats they build will be sold on underleases.

The leases and underleases will usually be registered. The freehold may not necessarily be registered depending on how long ago it was purchased.

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Finding the Owner of a Block of Flats

Finding the owner of a Block of Flats means that you are looking for the owner of the superior Title to your own, usually the freeholder. The freeholder will have his own registered title. When applying for your search the application form will ask you what tenure you require the search for. You will be able to choose between the freehold or the leasehold tenure. The Leasehold tenure will belong to your property, so you should select the freehold tenure.

The freehold Title Register will provide the freeholder’s ownership details in section B of the Register.

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Obtaining Short Details of Your Lease

If your reason for wishing to contact your freeholder is to find out when your Lease began, or how long it has left to run you can discover this from your own Leasehold Title Register. The A section of your Register will provide short particulars of the Lease. This will include the names of the original parties to the Lease, the date it was granted and the length of the Lease. From this information you can work out when it is due to expire.

If you need to buy a copy of your own Leasehold Title Register you should select the Leasehold Tenure on the application form rather than the Freehold Tenure.