Property Alert
Sign up to HM Land Registry's free Property Alert service to help protect your property from fraud.
Applies to England and Wales
How it works
You can:
- monitor a property if it’s already registered with HM Land Registry
- monitor the property of a relative; you don’t have to own a property to set up an alert
- choose up to 10 properties to monitor
You will receive email alerts when there is certain activity on the properties you are monitoring.
Sign up to Property Alert
- Create a Property Alert account.
- You’ll be sent a verification email. To activate your account, click on the link in the email.
- Sign in to your account and add the properties you wish to monitor. You need to have the address or title number of the property(ies).
Already registered
Alert information
We will send you an email alert each time there is significant activity on the property you are monitoring, such as if a new mortgage is taken out against it.
The alert will tell you the type of activity (such as an application to change the register or a notification that an application may be due), who the applicant is and the date and time it has been received.
Not all alert emails will mean fraudulent activity. If you don’t think the alert email is about any suspicious activity, you don’t need to do anything.
Signing up to Property Alert won’t automatically stop fraud from happening. You will need to decide if the activity on the property is potentially fraudulent and act quickly if so. The alert email will tell you who to contact.
Example of someone who has signed up for Property Alert
Mr Mills rented out his property in England while he lived overseas. He realised that absent landlords are more at risk of property fraud so he signed up to our Property Alert service.
Sometime later he received an alert email informing him that someone had made an application to register a mortgage on his property worth over £300,000. As Mr Mills wasn’t expecting this, he contacted our property fraud line. As a result of Mr Mills alerting us to the fact that the mortgage request was suspicious, we investigated and prevented the application from being registered once we realised it was fraudulent. As Mr Mills’ contact details were out of date, we advised him to update them so that if we needed to contact him in the future, he would be sure to receive our emails or letters.
As a result of signing up to Property Alert, Mr Mills was able to spot suspicious activity on his property and his prompt action in alerting us meant we were able to stop the fraudulent transaction from being registered.
Property fraud
Property fraud is where fraudsters try to “steal” your property, most commonly by pretending to be you and selling or mortgaging your property without your knowledge.
In the last 5 years, HM Land Registry has prevented 205 fraudulent applications being registered, representing properties valued in excess of £123.3 million.
To find out more about property fraud, watch our video.
Watch our video about property fraud
Find out who is more at risk of property fraud.
Contact
To contact the Property Alert team:
- email propertyalert@landregistry.gov.uk
- call 0300 006 0478 from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday
We send alerts by email. If you do not have an email address, call the Property Alert team.
Contact our Customer Support Team if you have a general question or casework enquiry unrelated to Property Alert.
Updates to this page
Last updated 19 October 2016 + show all updates
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Welsh version added
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Updated figure: Land Registry has stopped fraud on properties worth more than £80 million (since 2009).
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First published.