Existing Homeowner Check

eshaq786

I am just curious as to how an organisation such as a Housing Association or a Homebuy agency would check to see if someone owns a house or several in fact. Is there a website or service to do this where you would just search by someones name and address and other other detail? Or do they just take the applicants word for it?

The reason I ask is that I am currently doing some work for an estate agent and this topic came up in a discussion but no amount of googling brought up the answer.

Any help appreciated from you knowledgeable folks.

G_M

Well, I guess it's the same as someone rich and/or owning a property applying for a council house. You hear about this on some of those scam-busting documentaries. It's fraud, so the starting point is presumably that most people (being honest citizens) would declare any property they owned.

However I believe the Land Registry can do searches by name. That is not a public facility (unlike searching for the name of the owner of a specific property), but presumably police/fraud investigators can use this facility.

Whether councils/Housing Associations can, I don't know.

kingstreet

In my experience, investors looking to get their hands on social housing with shared equity deals simply use their kids to front the application.

We had a number doing this on the last development I worked on in Smethwick.

eshaq786

kingstreet wrote: »

In my experience, investors looking to get their hands on social housing with shared equity deals simply use their kids to front the application.

We had a number doing this on the last development I worked on in Smethwick.

What did you do when you discovered this? Was it prevented or do HA not bother and just turn a blind eye to it?What company do you work for in Smethwick or which development did you work on?

kingstreet

Let's just say we thought that was what they were doing and the immediate erection of "To Let" signs after completion pretty much backed up our theory.

We could prove nothing during the application process, so they were allowed to proceed, sadly.

I was working part-time for one of the Orbit Homebuy agents who's a member of the same network. It was a Midland Heart development on the corner of Holly Lane, called Cygnet Court.