Three steps from a postcode to a conversation with the owner. Here is what happens at each one, and what the platform checks along the way.
Type a postcode and a radius, or describe what you are after in plain English: "offices over 8,000 square feet in Reading with no planning constraints". Rezown returns every commercial property in range from the Valuation Office rating list, ranked nearest first and mapped.
Filter by floor area, rateable value, tenure, use type, whole buildings only, or by the outcome you need. You can ask for properties where the residual land value clears a number you set, which is a faster way to work than scrolling.
Vacant units are flagged where the rating list shows no occupier, which is the closest thing to a motivated-seller signal that public data supports.
Every property gets a Class MA verdict first, because there is no point appraising a building the rules exclude. Listed buildings, scheduled monuments, SSSIs, world heritage sites and national parks are excluded outright. An Article 4 direction gets flagged for you to verify rather than blocked, because only a minority of them actually bite on Class MA.
Then the numbers. Rezown estimates the unit yield from the floor area, prices the flats using real Land Registry sales in that outcode, applies a build cost and your own assumptions for fees, finance, contingency and profit, and shows you what is left for the land.
Every assumption is yours to change, and they save against your account so you are not retyping them on each search.
Residual land value
£1,504,000
Max to pay for the building before profit erodes
Rezown matches the building to its title at HM Land Registry and shows you the registered proprietor and whether that title is freehold or leasehold. If a company owns it, you get the Companies House record and the directors behind it.
From there you can approach the decision-maker directly. Most commercial stock never reaches the open market, and the owner of a half-empty building is often more receptive than the same owner would be through an agent.
We are straight about the limits here. Public ownership data carries both freehold and leasehold titles, and around half of the matches turn out to be leasehold, so the platform shows you which one it has found rather than presenting every match as the freeholder.
Directors
This is the part that saves the most time. Both of these came back from one search of the same town. One is worth a viewing. The other is worth forgetting, and knowing that on Tuesday morning rather than after a survey is the whole point.
Two storey former print works, 1,140 sqm, Class E, freehold, held by a company with two directors. Sits in a conservation area, which affects the ground floor treatment but does not exclude Class MA. Shallow plan, so daylight reaches the middle.
Residual land value
£1,504,000
Max to pay for the building before profit erodes
Nineteen seventies office block, 620 sqm of usable floorplate, Class E and technically eligible. It is over 18 metres, so it falls under the Building Safety Regulator with the Gateway delays that brings, and the deep plan means the middle of each floor never sees daylight.
Residual land value
−£366,000
Max to pay for the building before profit erodes
Sample buildings and figures, shown to illustrate the output. The live platform runs on official records.
These run automatically on every property in range, not on request. Most of them are the matters a prior approval application actually turns on, which is why they are worth seeing before you spend anything.
Sample data, shown to illustrate the interface.
Rezown is assembled from official registers rather than scraped listings or a resold third-party database. The Valuation Office rating list supplies the property index. HM Land Registry supplies corporate and overseas ownership. Companies House supplies the company and its officers. planning.data.gov.uk supplies the constraint layers, the Environment Agency supplies flood mapping and historic landfill, and Ordnance Survey supplies building heights and footprints.
Ownership and property data refresh monthly. Planning constraints refresh quarterly. The date each dataset was last updated is shown in the product next to the results it affects, so you always know how fresh the answer is.
Property locations come from postcode centroids, so a pin is accurate to the postcode rather than the doorstep, and a large building can pick up a neighbour's characteristics. Appraisals are indicative and built on outcode medians, not a valuation of that specific building. Lease lengths and expiry dates are not available in public data at any sensible price, so Rezown does not claim to know them.
What it does do is take a list of several hundred buildings and cut it to the handful worth your Tuesday. Everything after that is still your judgement, your consultant and your survey. Coverage today is London, Manchester, Birmingham and the Surrey, Berkshire and north Hampshire corridor.
Book a demonstration and we will run your actual area while you watch. Or leave your details and we will tell you the day it opens.