How to Find Out Who Owns a Property in Queensland

Quick answer: Yes, you can. The Queensland land register is public and anyone can search it without giving a reason. A current title search costs $25.71 and names the registered owner. You can search by street address, by lot on plan, or by the owner’s name. What you will not get is an address or a phone number, and there is no free way to see an owner’s name in Queensland.

Here is how to actually do it, what it costs, and the part most people get wrong at the end.

Can you find out who owns a property in Queensland?

Yes, and you do not need a reason.

Section 35 of the Land Title Act 1994 says a person may, on payment of the fee, search and obtain a copy of the indefeasible title of a lot. There is no eligibility test, no requirement to explain why you want it, and no need to be involved in a transaction. Neighbours, journalists, researchers, prospective buyers and the merely curious all have the same right of access.

That is a deliberate feature of the Torrens system. The register only works as a public record of ownership if the public can actually read it.

How do you find out who owns a property in QLD?

Three routes, depending on what you are starting with.

If you have the street address. Order a current title search using an address search. Titles Queensland’s own portal, OTIS, has one, as do the approved search distributors. This is the normal path and it takes a couple of minutes.

If you have the lot on plan or title reference. Go straight to the search. This is the cleanest route because it removes any ambiguity about which parcel you mean.

If you only have the address and want to check the parcel first. Use Queensland Globe, which is free, to convert the address into a lot on plan. This matters more than it sounds for units and townhouses, where a street address can sit across a footprint lot, common property and individual lots within a building format plan. Getting the parcel right before you pay is worth the extra minute.

One current caveat: Titles Queensland published an alert in April 2026 about address searches in OTIS returning affected results for newly created lots entered after 18 April 2026. If the property is in a brand new subdivision, search by lot on plan instead.

Can you search by owner name in Queensland?

Yes. This surprises people, including plenty of people in the industry.

The Queensland titles registry supports name searches, and the easiest public route to one is through an approved search distributor. CITEC Confirm, which is a Queensland Government commercialised business unit, lets you search by surname and given name with wildcards and returns a list of matching titles. InfoTrack offers the same for professional accounts, and its consumer arm sells an ownership search directly to the public. Titles Queensland can also run a bespoke investigative search of the register, charged by the hour.

You can tell the name search exists because the Queensland Government says so when explaining how to hide from it. Its guidance on suppression directions states that an approved application removes a person’s details from “name searches in the Titles Registry”.

But understand the limits before you rely on it. A name search matches the name as recorded on the register. It will miss property held through a company or a trust the person controls, property registered under a former or differently spelled name, and anything covered by a suppression direction. It is a name-matching tool, not an asset-tracing tool, and a nil result does not prove somebody owns nothing.

Is there a free way to find out who owns a property?

No, and this is where most searches stall.

Queensland Globe is genuinely free and genuinely useful. It will give you the lot on plan, the property area, the local government area, the real property description and the land valuation. What it will not give you, anywhere, is a name. Owner details are not among the fields it displays, and there is no name search option in it.

The same is true across the free government tools. There is no legitimate free source of a Queensland registered owner’s name. Free gets you to the parcel. The name costs $25.71.

If you find a site offering free owner details, be careful about what you are actually being sold and where the data came from.

What it costs

A current title search is $25.71 through Titles Queensland and returns in seconds. For the full fee list, the difference between a current and a historical search, and what each one includes, see our guide to the Queensland title search.

What does the search actually tell you about the owner?

A name. That is it.

A Queensland current title search shows the registered owner’s name and the tenancy, so you will see whether co-owners hold as joint tenants or tenants in common, and the shares if they are tenants in common. Under section 28 of the Land Title Act, the register records the name of the person who holds a registered interest. Names, not addresses.

There is no postal address, no email, no phone number. So “I will just write to the owner” does not follow from a title search the way people assume it will.

It also tells you about the registered legal owner and nobody else. Not the occupier. Not the tenant. Not the beneficial owner behind a trust. If you are checking a landlord, the registered owner and the lessor named on your lease can legitimately be different people.

Two sections worth reading before you draw conclusions. Unregistered dealings shows instruments lodged but not yet registered, so a property that has already sold can still show the old owner. Administrative advices can show a priority notice, which usually means a transaction is underway.

What if the owner is a company, deceased, or a trustee?

A company. The title gives you the company name. From there, an ASIC company extract gives you the directors, the registered office and the shareholders. The same distributors sell it.

A deceased owner. The title can still show a deceased person’s name until a transmission by death is registered, or until a death is recorded against a joint tenancy. On a historical search you will often see a “TRANS DEATH” dealing. If you are dealing with a deceased estate, the current title search is the right starting point because it tells you how the person held the interest, which decides what happens next.

A trustee. The registered owner is the trustee, not the beneficiaries. A title search will not tell you who benefits from a trust, and there is no public register that will.

How do you find previous owners of a property?

A historical title search ($37.88) shows the interests registered against the title since Queensland’s Automated Titles System began in 1994.

To go back further you need an image of the pre-1994 paper certificate of title ($25.71). Image quality varies depending on the age and condition of the original when it was scanned.

A useful shortcut: look at the title reference. References starting with 1, 2 or 3 are pre-1994 paper titles that have since been imaged. References starting with 5 or higher are computer titles created since 1994 and fully covered by a historical search.

Titles Queensland’s own guidance is that establishing ownership at a particular point in time often needs a combination of products, typically a historical search plus the imaged paper title. For research going back beyond the registry’s imaged holdings, Queensland State Archives holds the older land tenure and land title office records.

What can you legally do with the information?

This is the section nobody writes, and it is the one that matters if you are searching for a commercial reason.

The register is open, but what you do with a name you took off it is regulated in three separate places.

The Property Data Code of Conduct. This is Queensland-specific and has been in force since 2009. Under it, using personal identification information, meaning names and service addresses, for unsolicited direct marketing by mail, telephone or other means is expressly prohibited. Owners can apply to have their details suppressed from information brokers’ databases and can complain to the Code’s oversight committee.

Australian Privacy Principle 7. The OAIC’s guidance is almost written for this situation. Publicly available personal information can be used for marketing only with consent or where consent is impracticable, and the recipient must be given an easy way to opt out. The OAIC expressly includes mail, hand-delivered material and door-to-door marketing. It also warns that some public registers carry their own restrictions and tells businesses to check with the relevant body, naming state land title offices.

The Do Not Call Register Act and the Spam Act, which cover the phone call, the email and the SMS that often follow.

The practical translation: pulling owner names off the register to letterbox-drop or doorknock potential off-market vendors runs straight into a Queensland industry code that prohibits exactly that. Look it up before you build a campaign on it.

What if you cannot find the owner?

Consider that they may have taken steps not to be found.

Under section 188 of the Land Valuation Act 2010, the Valuer-General can grant a suppression direction where there is a risk to someone’s safety, expressly including harassment, stalking or other threats to personal security. A preference for privacy on its own is not enough, and applicants have to make a statutory declaration and are encouraged to provide supporting evidence such as police reports or domestic violence orders. A direction lasts five years and is renewable.

Where one is granted, the person’s name and address are removed from public land valuation rolls, from name searches in the Titles Registry, and from state and local government land records open to public inspection.

So a nil or partial name search result does not necessarily mean nothing is owned. It may mean someone has a serious reason to be invisible, and working around that is not something we would help with.

A word of caution

A title search tells you who is registered as the legal owner. It is not due diligence and it never was.

Contamination, flooding, planning and zoning, transport and resumption proposals, tree and fence orders, and building approval history all sit on different registers, and a search of the title will not touch any of them. We have set out what a Queensland title search shows and misses separately, and if you are actually buying, that is the more useful read.

Buying in Queensland and want the searches done properly? See our standard fees or get in touch.

Frequently asked questions

Can I find out who owns a property for free in Queensland?

No. Queensland Globe is free and will give you the lot on plan, the area and the land valuation, but it does not display owner names and has no name search. There is no free public source of a Queensland owner’s name.

Can you search property by owner name in Queensland?

Yes. The titles registry supports name searches, most easily accessed through an approved search distributor. It matches the name as it appears on the register, so it will miss property held through companies or trusts, or under a different spelling.

Does a Queensland title search show the owner’s address?

No. It shows the owner’s name and the tenancy. There is no postal address, email or phone number on a current title search.

How do I find out who owned a property before?

Order a historical title search ($37.88) for dealings since 1994, and an image of the pre-1994 paper certificate of title ($25.71) to go back further. Title references starting with 1, 2 or 3 are pre-1994 titles.

Can I use the owner’s name to contact them about buying their property?

Be careful. The Queensland Property Data Code of Conduct prohibits using names and service addresses taken from this data for unsolicited direct marketing by mail, phone or other means, and Australian Privacy Principle 7 covers mail and door-to-door marketing. Get advice before running any campaign built on register data.

Why can’t I find the owner in a name search?

Possible reasons include the property being held by a company or trust, a different or former name on the register, a spelling variation, or a suppression direction granted on safety grounds.