That building has been empty for years. Someone is paying for it.

Only if it completes, and most will not — so please do not treat this as income. Where a report leads to an acquisition we pay a finder reward of £500–£5,000, scaled to the transaction, on completion and not before. Three things about it that other versions of this idea leave out. It is disclosed to the owner, because when we tell them what information we hold and where it came from, “a member of the public was paid to tell us about your building” is part of that. It is taxable in your hands — it is income rather than a prize, and we will report it. And it is paid on completion of a purchase, not on a report, not on a viewing, not on an offer. If that makes it less exciting, good: a reward that only works while the owner does not know about it is not a reward, it is a liability with a delay on it.

We will not volunteer your name, and in practice we have never been asked for it. But we are not going to print a promise of anonymity on this page, because it is not ours to make. When someone asks what personal information an organisation holds about them, they are entitled to be told what is available about where it came from. There are circumstances in which that could reach back to you, and there are exemptions that might apply, and a company that tells you confidently which way that will go is telling you something it does not know. What we will say is the practical part: we approach owners by letter, once, in a way designed not to feel like an ambush, precisely so that the question of who reported it never becomes the interesting thing in the conversation. If anonymity is important to you, report it to the council instead — and honestly, report it to them either way.

Because a searchable public map of empty buildings is a bad idea four separate times over, and any one of them would be enough. It is a target list — empty buildings are the raw material of burglary, metal theft, squatting and arson, and publishing a curated national index of them is doing the reconnaissance for whoever wants it. It is an allegation about a person: “derelict” and “abandoned” attached to a specific address impute neglect to whoever owns it, and we would be the publisher of it, not the reporter. It is personal data, because an address plus the fact that it is empty is information about the person who owns that address. And a map of buildings owned by people who are then repeatedly contacted about them has an obvious harassment shape to it. The register exists. It is internal, and there is no version of this business where it is not.

Effectively, no — and this is the single most repeated piece of misinformation about empty property in the country. The power people mean is an Empty Dwelling Management Order, and it does exist: a council can apply to the First-tier Tribunal for an interim order over a dwelling that has been wholly unoccupied for at least two years, take over management of it, and let it, with the rent going to the owner net of costs. But it requires tribunal authorisation, evidence that the property is harming the community, and proof that the council tried to persuade the owner first. The recorded decisions ran at ten, five and five across three consecutive years, for the whole of England, against a stock of roughly a quarter of a million long-term empty homes. That is not a policy lever, it is a rounding error. Compulsory purchase is real, slower still and requires central government confirmation. If anyone is telling an owner that the council is about to seize their building, they are either mistaken or applying pressure they cannot back. The thing that actually moves owners is the annual bill.

Then you are the person this page is most useful to, and there is no reward involved on your side of it. What changed is that the trigger for the empty homes premium dropped from two years to one on 1 April 2024, which caught a very large number of owners who had budgeted on the old rule. The steps go to 200% of the standard bill at five years and 300% at ten, on top of the normal charge, so the total becomes two, three and then four times — compounding annually against an asset producing nothing. There are exceptions and they are narrower than people hope, mostly covering probate for a limited period, a property undergoing major structural works for a limited period, an annexe, a home left empty by someone in care or in the armed forces. Whether one applies to you is a question of fact and worth checking properly, because getting it wrong in either direction is expensive. Beyond that the honest set of options is short: sell, let it, refurbish and let it, or fix whatever is actually stopping you. Our appraisal at £650 prices all four rather than selling you the one we would earn most from, and if the answer is that you should keep it and let it through somebody local, we will write that down.

Because the box asking for it is the most dangerous field on a page like this, and almost everyone who builds one includes it. The problem is not you knowing something. The problem is us paying for it. If the reason you know who owns a building is that you deliver post there, or you work for the managing agent, or you have access to a council system, then a payment from us for that information can make us the party who procured a disclosure of personal data without the consent of the organisation that held it — an offence in its own right — and can look a great deal like an inducement, for which a company can be liable even where nobody senior knew about it and nobody intended it. There is no realistic way to run a paid tip line with an ownership field on it and be confident about which of those two kinds of knowledge you are buying. So we removed the field. Ownership is a five-minute search of a public register that anyone can do, including us, and paying for a shortcut around it would be an extraordinary risk for an extraordinarily small saving.

No, and the difference costs people money. The empty homes premium applies to a dwelling that is unoccupied and substantially unfurnished. A furnished second home that nobody lives in most of the year is not that — it sits under a separate regime, where councils have been able to charge a premium of up to 100% from 1 April 2025. So a furnished holiday flat and a stripped-out inherited house can be treated very differently even if both are dark three hundred nights a year. From the pavement you usually cannot tell which one you are looking at, which is one reason this form asks what you can see rather than asking you to categorise it. It is also why “no lights on, ever” is the weakest signal on the list and the tool says so.

Then this is the wrong form and you should stop filling it in. A structure that looks unsafe is a matter for the council’s building control team, who have powers under the Building Act that work in days rather than years, and it is worth phoning rather than emailing. If you believe people are inside, or that something criminal is happening, that is the police or the council’s housing team. We ask you not to put allegations of criminal conduct into this form at all, and that is not squeamishness: information about someone’s alleged offending carries its own legal regime, and there is no basis on which a property company can lawfully collect it for commercial purposes. A report to us does not get anybody rehoused, boarded up or arrested. It gets a letter written to an owner, eventually. Please do not let it substitute for the call that would actually help.

Sometimes, and we have to tell the owner that in writing before any negotiation starts — a personal interest disclosure is a statutory duty on estate agency work, not a courtesy. It matters here more than on any other page on this site, because on an empty building we can plausibly be the adviser, the buyer, the introducer of a buyer, or the developer, and those are four different sets of interests. So the rule we apply is simple and it is stated at the first contact rather than the last: the owner is told which of those we are proposing to be, in writing, before anything is discussed, and if it changes they are told again. If you are the owner and you want an appraisal with no possibility of us buying it, say so at the start and we will scope it that way.