I was reading up on an interesting article about HM Land Registry's free Property Alert service to help protect your property from fraud.

The service allows homeowners to protect themselves against property title fraud allowing property owners to judge whether an activity is suspicious.

Since September 2009, HM Land Registry has prevented 400 fraudulent applications from being registered, representing properties valued in excess of £207 million.

Official data revealed that 135,624 property owners registered for the free HM Land Registry’s Property Alert Service in 2021, compared with 46,043 in 2020.

More than 110,000 have already signed up this year and this includes me.

According to the data, 515,709 property owners in total have now signed up for the free service since its launch in 2014 but this is still less than 2% of all the properties across the country.

How it works:

• 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.

Here is the link to the alert service and more information:

• https://www.gov.uk/guidance/property-alert

Give me a call or an email if you have any questions.

Until next time
Thomas