How to find shooting rights or shooting estates for sale

Who among us hasn’t fantasised about owning a small (or even large) chunk of our glorious country? Whether we’re thinking about our own little fiefdom where we can host a few shooting buddies for a couple of days a season, or an idyllic stretch of trout stream where we can while away spring and summer days, or if we harbour dreams of setting up a rather grander commercial shoot, I’ll wager that every one of you reading this has a picture in your mind of the sort of thing that you’d like to do.

There are, of course, plenty of reasons why most of us don’t act upon these reveries, time and money being the most obvious. But at lease one of these may just have evaporated, thanks to a new web platform that aims to ‘Bring Land To Life’ to make buying and selling land a breeze.

The easy way to buy and sell land and shooting rights

Addland is a platform created by Thomas McAlpine and his team, that provides a single destination for anyone looking to buy or sell rural properties in the UK. I spoke to Thomas on a video call to get a picture of the platform, and how it all works. Thomas is a keen shot and GunsOnPegs member. “I grew up shooting,” he told me. “I got my first shotgun when I was 13, and I’ve shot ever since.” He added that a few days after we spoke he would be shooting at the Stockton Estate with Barney Stratton, who featured on a recent episode of The GunsOnPegs Podcast - shooting really is a small world sometimes.

Despite this background in shooting the idea for Addland grew more from Thomas’s background in property development. “My role was to find promotion opportunities for development, and I realised that it was incredibly fragmented,” he explained. “First you had to identify the potential sites, which was like doing countryside Tetris on Google Maps, and then you had to do all the due diligence: is there a flood zone, is there a listed building in the sightlines, is there a scheduled monument... it is incredibly time consuming, going to multiple government data sources. Once I’d done that I had to get in touch with the landowner, look into the planning history, establish a value, look at the neighbourhood plans. By the time you had done all of that it was pretty much a day’s work. I thought ‘I must be able to make this information available quickly and easily, in a more digestible format.’”

Thomas also wanted to address the other side of the equation. Having done his day’s work identifying a potential site, he had to contact the landowner to see if they were interested in selling. “The response rate,” said Thomas, “was about one in ten, so two weeks’ work for one lead. I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we knew whether the landowner even wanted to sell in the first place’.

It is the nature of many startup businesses in today’s day and age to identify an area where tech can be employed to smooth out the friction, and Thomas felt that he had found that area. He explained: “My thought was to create a single destination for land that brought all that data together in one easy-to-use place and enable people who want to sell their land to come and do that as well.”

Simple, easy to use

Having started building the site in 2018, and with many evolutions in the intervening time, Addland is now a slick, easy to use platform that delivers all of the above using intuitive map layers to display the important data, and a great function that allows users to narrow down the opportunities to find the exact kind of land they are looking for. The site seems to be ticking all the boxes, with over 2,000 developers and buyers signed up, and 450 agents listing land for sale.

It is easy to see why. When you visit Addland.com - which I highly recommend you do, even if it is simply to engage in a bit of ‘land porn’ (like property porn but on a grander scale!) - you are greeted with a page with detailed land filters that let you select the exact types of land you are seeking.

Thomas is keen, however, to reinforce that it’s much more than just finding land that makes Addland unique. “The research element, the incorporation of the data, allows people to undertake their own due diligence and determine if that land meets their needs, so they only spend time on what is 100% relevant to them”.

Shooting and fishing rights, country houses and estates

But what does all of this have to do with shooting rights? Well, this is where the detailed filters come into play. “Under our ‘rural’ category, you can list all kinds of properties including shooting rights and fishing rights,” explained Thomas, “There’s a separate 'recreation' subcategory where these can be found. But then there’s also beautiful country estates, listed via the likes of Savills and Knight Frank, farmland and woodland too.”

I’ve had a little poke around and in the first ten minutes I came across a really tempting little patch with a little pond near my home in Hampshire that comes with the duck flighting rights, as well as a big old chunk of Dartmoor with shooting rights, and even a beat of the river Tanet with native brown trout and a salmon run.

Of course, as an impecunious writer with young kids, these are miles beyond my entirely non-existent budget, but what is life without a pipedream? If you’re looking to set up a shoot, find some duck flighting, are looking for development opportunities or your new country estate, or if you’ve got a piece of land you’re looking to sell, Addland looks like a great option, and if you don’t have the funds for any of these… well… it’s a great way to dream away half an hour!