What does this company own? The register answers a different question

Somebody tells you the company owns land. Maybe it is a supplier asking for credit and mentioning a factory. Maybe it is a debtor you are chasing and someone says there is a plot worth going after. Maybe you are about to buy that plot.

So you go looking for the list of what the company owns.

There isn’t one. Not on the companies register, not anywhere else. India has no index that runs from an owner to their property, and the register that looks like it should have one is built to answer a different question entirely.

That sounds like bad news. It is more useful than that, because what the register does hold is oddly precise, and knowing which question it answers tells you exactly where to go for the rest.

The register records claims, not things

The companies register is a record of a company’s existence and its filings. It was never an asset register. What it captures about property is the moment somebody else acquires a claim over it.

Think of it as a lien noticeboard rather than a property deed cabinet. Nothing gets pinned to it when a company buys a building. Something gets pinned to it the day the company borrows against one.

That single design decision explains almost everything below: why the detail is so good in one place, why it is absent everywhere else, and why an asset nobody has lent against is invisible.

Where a filing does name a property, down to its boundaries

Here is the part most people never see, because it sits inside a document rather than on a summary page.

When a company creates a charge, it must register the particulars with the registrar under section 77 of the Companies Act 2013. The filing is made on Form CHG-1, and the current version of that form, in force since a substitution notified on 29 August 2022, asks for considerably more than a loan amount.

Field 7(a) asks for the description of the property charged from a fixed list of twenty-four options, running from immovable property split into residential, commercial and other, through equipment, inventory including receivables, motor vehicles and ships, the intangibles, and on to uncalled share capital, calls made but not paid, and book debts.

Then field 13(a) asks for the “short particulars of the property or asset(s) charged (including complete address and location of the property)”, and the sub-fields collect, for each plot or dwelling: the valuation at the date the security was created, the plot identifier, the survey or GAT number, street, locality, landmark, village or town, taluka, pin code, district, state, area, latitude and longitude, and the boundary on each of the four sides, north, south, east and west. Field 14 records the title documents by type and number.

That is a cadastral description. If you were expecting the register to be vague about property, this is where the expectation breaks.

One more field deserves its own paragraph. Field 15(a) asks whether any of the property under reference is not registered in the name of the company, and where the answer is yes, 15(b) requires the CIN or LLPIN, or an individual’s PAN, and the name of whoever it is registered to. That is a question you would never have known to ask, answered in a public filing.

Two boundaries on all of this. It only exists for property that has been pledged, and it only exists at the level of the document rather than the index: the free index of charges tells you a charge exists and who holds it, while the particulars above sit in the filing behind it. How to read that index, and what the amount on it does and does not mean, is a subject of its own.

Registration also does something to you, whether or not you looked. Section 80:

Where any charge on any property or assets of a company or any of its undertakings is registered under section 77, any person acquiring such property, assets, undertakings or part thereof or any share or interest therein shall be deemed to have notice of the charge from the date of such registration.

The accounts give you a number, not an address

The other place people expect to find property is the balance sheet, and it is a reasonable expectation that turns out to be wrong.

Schedule III to the Companies Act governs how a company presents its accounts. Land and buildings do not appear on the face of the balance sheet at all. They sit in the notes, and for a company on Accounting Standards the instruction is to classify:

(i) Classification shall be given as: (a) Land; (b) Buildings; (c) Plant and Equipment; (d) Furniture and Fixtures; (e) Vehicles; (f) Office equipment; (g) Others (specify nature).

A company on Ind AS gets the same list with bearer plants added. What follows in either case is a reconciliation of the gross and net carrying amounts of each class at the beginning and end of the period, with additions, disposals and depreciation. Every unit of presentation is a class. Search Schedule III for the words address, situated, location, survey or plot in an asset context and you will not find them.

So the accounts tell you a company holds ₹4 crore of land. They do not tell you where, how many parcels, or which one.

Getting even that number is slower than people expect, because a private company’s accounts arrive months after the year they describe.

The exception fires only when something is wrong

There is one place in the accounts where an individual property gets named, and it is worth understanding precisely because of when it triggers.

A notification of 24 March 2021, effective from 1 April 2021, inserted a block of additional regulatory information into every Division of Schedule III. Its first item:

(i) Title deeds of Immovable Property not held in name of the Company The company shall provide the details of all the immovable property (other than properties where the Company is the lessee and the lease agreements are duly executed in favour of the lessee) whose title deeds are not held in the name of the company in format given below and where such immovable property is jointly held with others, details are required to be given to the extent of the company’s share.

The table that follows asks for a description of the property, its gross carrying value, whose name the title deeds are in, whether that person is a promoter, director, relative or employee, since when the property has been held, and the reason it is not in the company’s name, with a footnote requiring the company to say if the matter is in dispute.

The auditor is made to say the same thing independently. Clause 3(i)(c) of the Companies (Auditor’s Report) Order 2020 requires the auditor to report

whether the title deeds of all the immovable properties (other than properties where the company is the lessee and the lease agreements are duly executed in favour of the lessee) disclosed in the financial statements are held in the name of the company, if not, provide the details thereof in the format below

with a near-identical table. That order was deferred twice and first applies to financial years commencing on or after 1 April 2021, and it exempts banking and insurance companies, section 8 companies, one person companies, small companies, and smaller private companies below thresholds on capital, borrowings and revenue. The auditor’s report is a mandatory attachment to the annual filing, so where it exists it travels with the accounts.

Read those two together and the shape is clear. The only place a company’s accounts name an individual property is where the company does not hold the title deed to it. A clean set of books names nothing. Which is a strange and quite useful fact: absence here is the normal case, and presence is a finding worth reading carefully.

Nobody files a resolution to sell one property

The next instinct is to look for the decision. If a company sold a building, surely something was filed.

Usually not. Section 179(3) lists the powers a board must exercise by resolution at a meeting, and selling property is not among them. Rule 8 of the Board Rules once came closest with a clause about buying and selling investments, and that clause was deleted in March 2015.

A special resolution is required where a company sells the whole or substantially the whole of an undertaking, and that resolution is filed within thirty days and is publicly inspectable. But “undertaking” is defined by thresholds of twenty per cent of net worth or total income, so one building rarely reaches it. And a notification of 5 June 2015 disapplies that section to private companies altogether. A second notification, of 13 June 2017, made that exemption conditional on the company being up to date with its annual return and its financial statements.

Situation	Filed?	Readable by you?
Public company sells one property by board resolution	Nothing filed	Nothing to read
Public company passes a listed board resolution, such as borrowing	Filed	No, inspection is expressly barred
Private company, any board resolution of that kind	Nothing filed	Nothing to read
Any company sells substantially the whole undertaking	Filed within 30 days	Yes
Private company sells substantially the whole undertaking	Nothing filed	Nothing to read

The great majority of companies on the register are private. For them, the middle three rows are the whole story, and the register is silent by design rather than by oversight.

The second register, and the one search that starts from the company

Charges over property are registered in a second place that almost nobody outside lending has heard of: the central registry established under the SARFAESI Act 2002, which everyone calls CERSAI.

Two things make it worth your time. Section 26 of that Act opens the register to inspection by any person, and says so twice, once for inspection in person and once for electronic inspection. And its public search, which needs no account, costs ₹10 plus tax and offers a borrower-based search that accepts a company’s CIN.

That is the only search in this whole exercise that runs from the company towards its assets. Everything else runs the other way. It still returns claims rather than ownership, and it is worth knowing what neither register reaches:

• A limited liability partnership has no duty to register charges at all. There is no equivalent of the Companies Act’s charge chapter in the LLP Act 2008. A filing pathway exists, and LLP Form 8 doubles as a charge filing, but the Act imposes no duty to register a charge and attaches no consequence to not doing so.
• Statutory attachments for unpaid tax are outside the companies register. Section 77 covers charges a company creates, and a tax attachment is not one. CERSAI is the other way about: section 26B(4) of the SARFAESI Act requires tax and government-dues authorities to file attachment orders with the central registry from a date the government notifies, and CERSAI registers attachment orders alongside security interests.
• Timing. A charge created this month may not be registered yet, so a search run on the day of a transaction cannot see it.
• A repaid loan can still show as an open charge, because the duty to report satisfaction sits on the company and a company with its money back has little reason to file.

Where ownership actually lives

Ownership of land is recorded by the state, at the sub-registrar’s office, and the way those records are indexed decides what you can ask them.

Section 55 of the Registration Act 1908 requires four indexes, of which Index No. I holds the names of the persons executing and claiming under every document in Book 1, and Index No. II holds the property particulars for the same documents. Section 57(1) then makes Book 1 and its indexes “open to inspection by any person” on payment of the fee, and requires copies to be given to all persons applying.

So the right of search is genuinely public. What the public services built on top of it actually expose is a search against a property, which is what an encumbrance certificate is: a certified extract of what the index shows for a described property over a stated period. You can verify a property you can name. You cannot ask the registry to enumerate a company’s holdings.

The nearest thing to an owner-first search sits in state land records rather than in the deeds registry, and what a state exposes to the public changes. Telangana’s Bhu Bharati portal, which replaced Dharani, will return a land record against a survey number, a pattadar passbook number or a company’s CIN, though not against an owner’s name. Andhra Pradesh’s Meebhoomi now puts record viewing behind a logged-in session. Both were checked on 22 September 2026, and both are the kind of thing that moves.

Assetly runs those state searches, and the encumbrance and revenue-record checks on a property once you can name one. It is built by the same team as Entiva, and it exists because this half of the problem is a different register, a different authority and a different skill from reading company filings.

One caveat that applies to all of it: a revenue record is a fiscal entry, not a title, and a name in it settles nothing about ownership.

What to do with this

1. Get the legal name and the CIN or LLPIN in writing, and check the status before anything else. If the entity has been struck off, you have a different problem, and establishing that it is real and alive takes two minutes and costs nothing.
2. Pull the index of charges to see whether anyone has a claim, and who.
3. Read the charge documents themselves where the answer matters. That is where the address, the survey number and the boundaries are, and it is one of the eight categories a company’s file is divided into.
4. Search CERSAI by CIN as well. It costs ₹10 plus tax and covers security interests the companies register may not.
5. Check the accounts for the title-deed table. If it is populated, read every column, especially whose name the deed is in.
6. Then go to the state records for the property itself. An encumbrance certificate, the revenue record and the local prohibited-property list answer questions no company filing reaches.

The honest summary is that no single search answers “what does this company own”. Four partial answers exist, they are held by different authorities, and three of the four are searchable by anyone for a few rupees. Assembling them is the work, and knowing that the balance sheet was never going to give you an address saves you the hour you would have spent looking for it.

You can look up any Indian company or LLP free, no account, and see the status before you decide whether the rest is worth doing.