10,786,493 companies sit on the register.
209,654 changed hands.
Everything else is rock.
An owner being 63 is not timing — it was true last year and will be true next year. Quarry reads the UK ownership register as a time series and looks for what moved.
The seam
1.94% of the register
What the register says about age
53
Median age of an owner at the moment they sold
30.2%
Were 60 or over. The other 70% were not.
Every deal-sourcing tool on the market screens for old owners. On 316,736 real transitions, age barely separates a seller from anyone else — which is why those screens return a million names.
So the screener starts where everyone else stops
Cross-checked against the live register, filterable by sector and place, and honest about the fact that age is the weakest signal on the page.
Open the screenerMethod
Source
The Companies House PSC snapshot — the full public register of beneficial ownership, republished daily. Free, and no key needed to read it.
Ground truth
Ownership changes are visible after they happen. That makes a signal something you can test against what occurred, rather than assert.
Honest limits
The event is rare. A naive screen drowns in false positives, and the base rate that says so is on this page rather than buried in a footnote.