Report: Acquisition and prospecting
The acquisition report is becoming part of Placepoint Fusion. The report itself is not finished, but everything it builds on is available today: the criteria search, the registered owner, the company behind it, the roles and the export. This page goes through an acquisition search track by track and shows where each point is answered.
The report is coming, the groundwork is here
The report gathers the hit list from one criteria search into a single document: the properties that meet the criteria, each with its registered owner, the company behind it, the key figures for that company and the roles you can approach. Until it is ready, you do the round below yourself, one form and one tab at a time in Filter and the Company panel, switch on the map layers that show which properties stand out, or let Placepoint AI put the list together. It is the same data in all three cases; the difference is who writes the document.
The distinction that matters in acquisition runs between what the registers know and what only the owner knows. Who holds title, what the company behind it is called, who sits on the board, how old the building is, when the property last changed hands and what is zoned around it are register data, and they are in the console from the first search. Whether the owner wants to sell, what they would accept, and how you reach them outside the registered business address is not in any public register and never will be. That is your conversation, not the report's. The report states which pieces of information this applies to rather than pretending it has them.
See also: Finding the right property on placepoint.no.
A search and a list are not the same thing
A search answers a question once: how many undeveloped plots over 5,000 m² are there in this municipality, and which ones are they. The answer is fresh for three minutes, and then the session is over. A list is something else. It lives for weeks, it is shared with colleagues, and every row has a state: not contacted, called, declined, in dialogue, offer sent. The list also has an internal owner, and a next step per row. That is the difference between finding something and running an acquisition process.
The report is the bridge between the two. It freezes the hit list into a document with owner, company and contact point per row, so the list can be read and worked on by someone who did not sit with the filter. What keeps the list alive afterwards is three areas in the console: Tags carries the selection, Projects carries the work around it, and Datasets carries your own columns alongside the register data.
The reason the order matters is that the best deals rarely start with a listing. An off-market approach assumes you have the list before the property is for sale. Once the prospectus is out, you are one of many, and the price is set by the bidding round rather than by the conversation. A systematic search repeated every month, with tags that remember who you have already spoken to, is what makes a property transaction possible before it becomes an auction.
Who this is for
Acquisition managers at developers and investors, commercial property agents working on a buy-side mandate, project developers building a land bank, and B2B sellers who need to find the right company behind an address. What they have in common is that the unit of work is a list rather than a single property, and that the job is measured by how many of the rows turn into a conversation.
The selection is drawn from the same foundation wherever in the country you are looking: 3.5 million matrikkelenheter, 1.1 million active companies and over 14 million registered owners and rights holders, with around 320 main map layers in 18 categories on top of them. See Placepoint in numbers for the full overview.
The checklist
| Track | What to look for | Where in Placepoint |
|---|---|---|
| The criteria | Location, area, year built, building type, purpose, ownership form | Filter, Search |
| From hit to owner | Registered owner, the company behind it, ownership chain, beneficial owners | The Owners tab in the Property panel, the Company panel |
| Who you call | Chair of the Board, managing director, signing rights, registered business address | The Roles tab and the Offices tab in the Company panel |
| The signals | Year built, long ownership with no sale, development in the neighbourhood, a plan under consideration | Building age, the Transactions tab, Developer activity, Regulation plan proposals |
| The list | The selection, the status per row, your own columns and the export | Tags, Projects, Datasets |
| The follow-up | A message when something happens on a property you follow | Monitoring |
The map layers are switched on from Map layer in the left menu. See How to use map layers if you have not done it before.
The criteria
Filter is where the criteria are set, against the whole matrikkel. The panel has two filter types, and the choice decides which fields the form gives you: Property searches all properties in Norway, Company searches Norwegian companies by name, organisation number, industry, address, accounts and group structure. An acquisition search usually starts in the property type, while an outbound sales process just as often starts in the company type and goes the other way, from company to property.
The fields in Property are grouped into the sections Location, Property, Revenue, Empty, Buildings, Energy And Certification, Owners, Tenants, Lessees and Municipality plan. Those sections decide which criteria actually exist: location and municipality, the area of the property and of the plot, previous sales, the year and type of the buildings, who owns and who rents, and what the municipality plan says about the plot. Company, for its part, has Company, Location, Accounts, Conglomerate And Owners, Property portfolio (As Landlord), Premises (As Tenant) and Roles And Board.
Values are set in five ways: pick lists for fields such as Municipality and Building Type, from and to ranges for Built Year and Use area, from and to dates, free text, and a histogram where you drag in the distribution you want. Choose filters controls which fields the form shows, section by section, and a field you remove there drops out of the search immediately. Active filters appear as chips above the results, and the cross on a chip resets that one field.
The number of hits changes as you adjust, and the hits are drawn as green clusters in the map, each with its hit count inside. That is the quick calibration: if the clusters cover tens of thousands of properties, the criteria are too loose for anyone to call through the list. Zoom in or click a cluster to break it up into one dot per property, and click the dot to open the Property panel. Follow map extent limits the hits to the map view you are looking at right now. Show in table opens the hits as a table at the bottom of the screen, with one tab per dataset in the filter type, and Export downloads the table as an Excel file.
The export takes up to 10,000 rows. If there are more hits, the search has to be narrowed first. Saved searches under Saved searches are kept until you reload the page, so a search you will run again next month belongs in a project or as a tag, not just in the form.
From hit to owner
A hit list without an owner is a list of polygons. The Owners tab in the Property panel is the first step onward: it shows registered owners and company owners with the ownership chain from Brønnøysundregistrene, with filters for Companies, Persons or All. Click an owner, and you get that owner's portfolio across Norway. That is often where one row in the list becomes fifteen: a property you found on criteria turns out to belong to a property company that owns the whole block.
Legal title is not the same as ownership in practice. If a limited company is the registered owner of the matrikkelenhet, the question is who owns that company. The Company panel answers that in the Ownership tab, which has four sub-tabs: Beneficial owners, Shareholders per financial year from the shareholder register, Ownership tree upwards towards the parent companies, and Conglomerate with parent, subsidiary and sister companies. The default sub-tab is Beneficial owners, because that is the level a counterparty assessment needs.
If the property sits in a single purpose vehicle, the company is empty apart from that one property, and the Properties tab in the same panel confirms it: if only this property is listed under Owned properties, you have a pure property company in front of you. Then the shares are what is traded, and the decision is taken in the parent company rather than in the company listed in the matrikkel. The Ownership tree shows whether the portfolio is held directly or through subsidiaries, and that decides who the approach should go to.
The ownership chain stops where it leaves Norway. If a link is a foreign company, Brønnøysundregistrene has no depth data, and the ultimate owner has to be verified against foreign registers or the company's own annual report.
Who you actually call
The Roles tab in the Company panel is the contact point the registers actually give you. It lists the roles in the company from Brønnøysundregistrene: chair of the board, board members, managing director, signing and procuration rights, auditor and accountant. The cards at the top of the tab bring out the managing director and the chair of the board separately, and the composition of the board with the number of members and deputy members next to them. Click a person, and you see that person's other roles across companies. That is the fastest check of whether you are facing a professional player with 20 companies behind them, or a single owner.
The Offices tab gives the other half: the business and office addresses registered on the company, the addresses as a tree when the company has several locations, and a relocation history with dates. An off-market approach starts here, with a name, a role and an address that is correct today. At the top of the panel you also have the link to the company in Brønnøysundregistrene and to Proff for extended accounts and credit information.
The registers give name, role, year of birth and the company's registered business address. Phone numbers and email addresses are not part of them, and are therefore not in the console. The same goes for who really takes the decision when that does not follow the formal role. You find the contact details yourself, and the report says so rather than delivering an empty column.
The signals that make a property relevant
The criteria give you properties that fit. The signals tell you which of them are relevant now. Four of them carry most of the work.
The year built is the first. Building age colours the building stock by year of registration and reads a whole area at a glance: where the areas are dark, post-war buildings are approaching the end of their technical life. A low built area against the plot area in the same place is the other half of the signal, since the plot ratio is what development potential is measured in, and a transformation property is usually an old building stock on a plot that can take much more.
Long ownership without a sale is the second. The Transactions tab in the Property panel shows the whole sales history with registered transfers and share transactions side by side. A property that last changed hands 25 years ago, in a company that has not bought anything since, is a different conversation from one that was bought last year by a player with a clear strategy. The share transactions belong here, because a change of ownership that went through the shares never appears in Grunnboken.
Development in the neighbourhood is the third. Developer activity shows works areas from FKB, with its own colour per type of works: new build, extension, upward extension, demolition, façade change, subdivision of property, and construction of roads and parking. A neighbouring plot that has already been through the process tells you what the municipality accepted on height and density, and that is a better starting point for a valuation than an estimate. The fourth is the planning status: a property that lies within a plan proposal under consideration may be worth something quite different in six months.
| Map layer | Answers |
|---|---|
| Building age | How old the building stock is, area by area |
| Commercial buildings | Where office, industry, retail, warehousing and logistics are located |
| Developer activity | Who is building in the area now, and what they have been allowed to do |
| Regulation plan proposals | Planning work under consideration that can change the assumptions |
| Zoning Plans | Current purpose and plan boundaries, including on the neighbouring plots |
| Housing and area reserve (Oslo) | Zoned housing capacity that has not been built out |
| Ownership and Company Structure | Which buildings belong to the same player, coloured by the owner's industry |
| Number of transactions (property) | How often properties in the area actually change hands |
| Real Estate Transactions in the Media | What comparable properties have been reported sold for |
A signal is not a willingness to sell. An old building, low utilisation and long ownership say that the property is ripe for densification, not that the owner has had the thought. The order in the list is a prioritisation of who you call first, not a ranking of who says yes.
Keeping the list
A selection that only exists in a form is gone when you reload the page. Add tag at the top of the Property panel attaches the property to a named list, and you create a new tag in the same step by typing the name and clicking Create new tag. A property can have many tags, so the same hit can be marked with area, round and priority at once, and filtered on any one of them.
Tags in the left menu gathers them: a searchable card list with matrikkelnummer, address, coloured tag chips and a thumbnail per property, the count at the top, and Show table at the bottom, which opens the whole selection as a table. Tagged properties appear as coloured points in the map, and the eye icon hides them while you work on something else. The colours are what make the status readable without reading: one colour per phase in the process, used the same way by everyone in the workspace. Tags are shared with the team, so the names have to make sense to a colleague who was not part of the search.
Projects is the level above. A project is a workspace around one task, and it holds Properties as a list with filtering, grouping and export, Areas as polygons you draw around the search area, and Activities as a chronological log of notes and tasks on the project's properties. That is where the dialogue with the landowner belongs, rather than in an email thread no one else sees.
If the list needs columns the registers do not have, Datasets takes them. You upload a spreadsheet, link the rows to the matrikkel on matrikkelnummer or address, and get your own layer in the map with your own fields alongside the register data. That is the place for the estimated price, the internal owner of the row and what was said last time. Monitoring closes the circle: the municipality's post lists are run daily against the properties in the project, and a new building case or a registered change of ownership on a property you follow becomes an activity in the log.
If the list is going on to a CRM, you export it to Excel from Filter. The file has address, matrikkel, area, owner, tenant and the latest transaction data per row. See Import, export and sharing for the formats and the limits.
The report itself
The format is a list with a header, not a narrative. The criteria set comes first, so the reader knows exactly which question the list answers, and then one row per property with what it takes to decide whether to call or not. Each row carries its own source and date, and what has not been checked appears as its own section rather than as an empty column.
| Section | Content |
|---|---|
| The criteria set | The fields and values the search ran on, the number of hits and the date it was run |
| The hit list | One row per property: matrikkelnummer, address, municipality, plot area, use area, year built and building type |
| Owner per row | Registered owner, the company behind it, the ownership chain up to beneficial owners |
| Contact point | Chair of the board, managing director, signing rights and registered business address |
| Signals | The latest sale and length of ownership, the planning situation, and development registered nearby |
| Not checked | Willingness to sell, price expectations, and contact details that are not in a public register |
Source and date per row is the point of generating the list from the registers rather than putting it together by hand. A row that is three months old may have a new registered owner, a new board or a new plan, and a list without a date stamp is a list no one dares to call from. The section for what has not been checked is the scope limitation, and it always belongs there: it says where the sales work begins.
Create the report today with Placepoint AI
Placepoint AI has access to the same sources as the forms, tabs and map layers above, and writes the list from a single prompt. An example of a finished selection is on Examples and tips: a lead list for a roofing contractor, with 1,517 properties filtered on year built and building type, linked to the owning company. The prompt does not need to be longer than this:
Create an acquisition list for [municipality or area]. Criteria: [building type],
built before [year], plot area over [number] m². For each property: matrikkelnummer,
address, plot area, use area, year built, registered owner, the company behind it with
the ownership chain up to beneficial owners, chair of the board and managing director,
registered business address, the latest registered sale with date, and whether the
property lies within a plan proposal under consideration. Clearly mark what is not
available in the registers.
If the list is going straight into a spreadsheet or a CRM, ask for a table rather than a report, one row per property and one column per field above. The default instructions on the same page are the place to put what your business always wants included, so you do not have to repeat the criteria in every prompt.
If you are in the map, the Agent does the short lookup without you switching tools: "Who owns this property, and who sits on the board of the company behind it?" gives the registered owner, the ownership chain and the roles as text with links onward. The map moves to where the answer is.
Related areas
- Filter - the criteria, the hit list and the export.
- Search - the way in when you have an address, a matrikkelnummer or a company name.
- Company panel - ownership chain, roles, offices and accounts for the company behind it.
- Tags - the selection that survives the session.
- Finding property and opportunities - the whole round from the first search to a shortlist, on one plot.
- Report: Tenant analysis and tenant search - when you are looking for tenants rather than properties.
- Report: Portfolio - everything one company owns, when one hit became a portfolio.
- Report: Ownership structure and title - the ownership chain alone, in depth.
- Report: Due diligence - the round you do on the candidate that survives the list.
Data sources
- The matrikkel, Grunnboken and land registration via Kartverket.
- Brønnøysundregistrene (companies, roles, business addresses) and the shareholder register at Skatteetaten.
- Geodata (compiled business and pricing map layers).
- Oslo kommune (the housing and area reserve).
- Municipal planning registers and post lists, with coverage in Coverage Map Case Access.