Find UK businesses to buy, before they are for sale

Off-market means the owner has not decided to sell, so no listing exists to find. The practical route is to work from public records instead: identify companies whose shape fits what you want to buy, then approach them directly or through an adviser. SME44 does the first half, by searching UK companies that hold a live regulator licence or trade from premises traceable to HM Land Registry.

No. Nothing on SME44 is for sale and there are no listings, no asking prices and no introductions. It is a research tool over public registers. Rajoka Limited takes no commission on any transaction and provides no estate agency services within the meaning of the Estate Agents Act 1979.

Public registers: Companies House, HM Land Registry Commercial and Corporate Ownership Data, the Care Quality Commission, Ofsted, the Traffic Commissioners, the Environment Agency, the Food Standards Agency, and the Home Office register of licensed sponsors. Every figure names the register it came from.

One page on one company: who controls it and for how long, what it is licensed to do, the premises and who holds the title, what is owed and whether filings are late, and its size and latest filed results. It can be saved as a dated PDF. An opened report stays open for 24 hours and reopening it in that window costs nothing.

Searching is free and unlimited. Reports are paid: a single report is £9, or plans start at £49 a month for ten reports, £149 a month for five a day, and £499 a month for ten a day across three seats. All prices include VAT and subscriptions can be cancelled at any time.

Not using this data for unsolicited approaches. HM Land Registry licenses the ownership data on condition that it is not used for direct marketing, including unsolicited offers to buy a business or its premises, and that condition binds every user as a term of access. The data is for factual research and due diligence. How you then originate a conversation is your responsibility and must comply with the same rules that bind us.

Companies House tells you about one company at a time and holds no licence or property data. The work here is the matching: joining company records to regulator licences and to HM Land Registry title data, so you can search by what a business does and what it owns rather than by its name. That join is what Companies House cannot answer.

Every report states the date the registers behind it were last checked, and search results carry the same as-at date. Registers themselves lag reality: a company can be sold months before it appears at Companies House, and a satisfied charge can sit on the register until someone files to remove it.

Search fund buyers, private equity origination teams, acquisition entrepreneurs, trade consolidators building in one sector, succession advisers looking for mandates, and brokers researching buy-side briefs.

No, and nothing here should be read that way. They are filters for a business that is genuinely trading and has an asset under it. Whether an owner would ever sell is not on any register, and SME44 does not guess: it ranks nothing, scores nothing, and draws no conclusion about any company or person.