How to find previous owners of your house

Why a simple search does not exist

Two records people expect to help will not. The current title register shows the current owner, not a list of past ones. And sold price records list prices and dates from 1995, with no names. So a postcode search can tell you a house changed hands in 2009, but not who sold it.

Names come from older versions of the register, from deeds, and from archives. Each of these is searched by property, usually using the title number, so start by finding that. It is on the title register, which costs £7 to download if you do not already have a copy.

Start with papers you already have

If it is your own house, check before you pay for anything. Your conveyancer's file, your mortgage lender or a box of old papers may hold deeds or earlier conveyances. The National Archives suggests HM Land Registry, your solicitor and your mortgage company as places to try, along with solicitors' collections and family and estate papers in archives.

Older deeds may be gone. There is no legal obligation to hold evidence of title for more than 30 years, so papers from before then may not have been kept.

Historical title registers

A historical edition is a copy of the register as it stood on a past date, and it can show who owned the property before the current owner.

1. Find the title number.
2. Pick the date or dates you are interested in, such as a time before a sale you can see in the price data.
3. Download form HC1 from Search the register on GOV.UK.
4. Send it to HM Land Registry with £11 for each date. The fee is £7 through the portal used by conveyancers.

HM Land Registry's guidance says register history may be available for dates after 4 May 1993. For earlier dates, contact it with the title number or address and the dates you need. It will check whether a copy exists and explain how to apply. Some older material is on paper, which can take time to retrieve.

Historical copies may not provide a complete record of every transaction, so one or two editions may not give you an unbroken chain of owners.

Copies of deeds

Deeds can show current and past information about a registered property, including earlier owners. HM Land Registry does not store original paper deeds. It only has a scanned copy if the register describes the deed as filed, so read the title register first and look for that wording.

To request one, use form OC2 with the title number. Each official copy costs £11, and the deeds may consist of several documents, so the cost can add up. If there is no scanned copy, the search may return nothing.

Going further back

Before the 1990s you are mostly relying on history rather than registration. Registration only became compulsory across England and Wales in 1990, although The National Archives notes that voluntary registrations may date from 1862. There was no national system before that.

Census returns and the 1939 Register name the people who lived in a house, and those people may have been tenants. See who lived in my house before me? for that side of the story. National Archives records give snapshots, so they rarely produce a continuous chain of owners by themselves.

Stay with the public record

All of these routes are lawful and designed for property research. If your reason is practical, such as a covenant, a boundary or an old agreement, a conveyancer can usually tell you whether you need the name at all. Former owners are private individuals, so use what you find for the property question you started with, and do not try to trace or approach them.

A Doorstep Report does not name past owners. It shows registered sale prices and dates from 1995, which can help you choose which historical date to request. Our ownership page sets out what it can and cannot show.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland, nidirect says a Land Registry folio lists previous owners from the date the property was first registered. For unregistered land, the Registry of Deeds is the place to look, with older records at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

In Scotland, ScotLIS sells title sheets, but historical documents such as search sheets are not included with them.