Land Registry
The Land Registry (or to give it its full name, Her Majesty’s Land Registry, or HMLR for short) holds the largest property registration database in the world, and oversee the titles for all property transactions in England and Wales. Given that the Land Registry estimates that around a million pounds of property transfers take place every minute in England and Wales, and they guarantee that their ownership details are correct, the size of the task they carry out is clearly enormous.
The Land Registry are also bound by law that, if you write to them requesting ownership details of a particular property and unless there are larger national interests or security reasons behind a refusal, they must tell you firstly if they hold the information, and secondly tell you what the details are.
Generally you will not deal with Land Registry, since your conveyancer will be the one to liaise with them and provide change of property ownership details to them. However, if you want to deal with them yourself you can do so.
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