New data on property in England & Wales owned by overseas individuals

12 November 2021

Update June 2023: We have published corrections to this report, due to errors in data supplied by HM Land Registry. Please see the blog post for full details, and the report for tracked changes.


Today, CFPD publishes new data and research on properties in England & Wales owned by individuals based overseas.

Our research highlights the need for better data on UK property, to enable more systematic and better-informed work on affordability, and the lack of progress on previous transparency and data commitments.

Read the report (PDF), or explore the data below.

Summary

About the research

  • Rising house prices in the UK are often attributed in part to purchases by overseas individual buyers. However, gaps in published official data hamper our understanding of such purchases, with previous analysis of the number and effect of overseas buyers being based on small samples or anecdotal reports.  

  • While official data on titles in England & Wales registered to companies based overseas has been published since 2017, there is no equivalent official data for titles registered to individuals based overseas - not even the total number of such titles.

  • We obtained previously unpublished data from HM Land Registry on the number of property titles owned by individuals with an overseas correspondence address - such an address indicates that the owner intends to be based overseas to a significant extent.

Our findings

  • The data shows that 181,701 titles across England & Wales are now registered to individuals with an overseas correspondence address, representing 0.7% of all registered titles. This number has more than doubled since 2010, when such individuals owned around 0.25% of all titles in England & Wales.

  • This number is also now around double the number registered to overseas companies (94,712 titles), suggesting that individual purchasers are an increasingly important factor in the UK property market. 

  • More than 80% of the titles are registered to individuals with addresses in just 20 countries, with the main groups being South-East Asia, the Middle East, and English-speaking countries.

  • The rise in properties registered to individuals in the Middle East and South-East Asia have been particularly fast in recent years, which may reflect second home or investment purchases by owners in these countries.

  • The growth in titles registered in Northern cities like Liverpool, Manchester, and Salford has also been notable, particularly since 2016, which is likely to reflect investment purchases of flats in these cities.

  • Previous studies of the effect of such buyers on affordability for domestic purchasers have been limited, based on small samples or anecdotal evidence. The purpose of our work is to enable more systematic and better informed work on affordability, which we hope will support better-evidenced policy responses.

Our recommendations

  • The lack of official data on this topic reflects a broader lack of high-quality evidence on factors affecting demand for UK property. We recommend measures to improve data availability in a range of areas, including: 

    • The Government should prioritise the Draft Registration of Overseas Entities Bill (to which it has already committed), which will create better data on the nature of property owned via overseas corporate structures;

    • The Government should progress its proposed measures to create a public register of options and contracts over land;

    • The Government should improve published official data on the count and location of buy-to-let mortgages;

    • HM Land Registry should publish data on individual overseas ownership annually as experimental statistics.

Read the report

Read the full report (PDF).

Explore the data

You can explore the data below, or see our GitHub repo for full analysis code and links to the FoI requests.

Total properties registered to overseas individuals, 2010-21

Use the search tool to find a particular country.

Countries with the most individuals with registered titles in England & Wales

Local authorities with the most titles owned by overseas individuals

Full table of titles by country and district, 2010-21