Short answer

There is no dedicated ownership field yet, though one is wanted. The most practical workaround is to put a consistent keyword in the Notes field, such as OWNED or MAINTAINED, and then filter on Note in the asset list's Advanced Filters. On the map, you can give areas different colours, so land you own reads differently at a glance from land you only maintain. Record it either way, because an asset you maintain but do not own still needs its inspections and still builds your evidence that the work was done.

Detail

Why record assets you don't own

This trips people up, so it is worth stating plainly: the register is not a list of property titles. It is a list of what the council is responsible for. Councils routinely maintain play equipment, car parks, verges and footpaths owned by a district, borough or county authority, and those are exactly the assets where a defensible record of inspections matters most, because the council is carrying the operational duty without owning the thing.

The options, best first

1. A keyword in Notes. Type the same word on every relevant asset, for example OWNED or MAINTAINED, or the name of the owning authority. Then open the asset list, click the funnel icon for Advanced Filters, and filter on Note. This is the option to reach for: the field is free text so it takes any scheme you like, it survives bulk editing, and it filters cleanly.

2. The Description field. Works identically and also filters in Advanced Filters. Choose Notes or Description and stick to it, rather than splitting the information across both.

3. External ID. Also filterable, and a natural home for the owning authority's own reference number. One constraint to design around: External ID values must be unique across your assets, so you cannot type MAINTAINED on twenty records. Use a coded scheme instead, such as OWN-001 and MTN-001, or the owner's actual asset reference.

4. The asset name. Possible, but the weakest option. The asset name flows into the title of every task raised against it, so an ownership marker in the name shows up on a field operative's phone every time they open a check. Keep names describing what the thing is.

On the map

Areas can be coloured individually. Right-click an area, and the context menu offers colour along with Send to Back and Lock. So owned land in one colour and maintained land in another works today, and is the fastest way to read a site at a glance.

Treat colour as a visual aid rather than a record. It is not something you can filter, export or report on, so pair it with the Notes keyword above if you need to pull a list.

What's coming

An explicit ownership drop-down is something we want to add. Nothing is built yet, so the workarounds above are the answer for now. If it matters to your council, log or upvote it at ideas.civic.ly.

Watch-outs

  • Do not use the AGAR checkbox to mark ownership. It looks tempting and it is filterable, but it does a different job: it flags which assets appear on your AGAR asset register, and the total of those assets' purchase values is what reconciles to your AGAR Box 9 figure. Repurposing it as an ownership flag makes that total wrong. Owned and AGAR-registered are not the same set anyway, since the register can properly include things the AGAR return excludes.
  • Pick one scheme and use the same word every time. The filter matches text, so OWNED, Owned and "council owned" behave as three different markers.
  • Where responsibility is split, consider splitting the asset instead. If the council maintains the surface but the owner maintains the equipment on it, two assets with two inspection regimes is usually clearer than one asset with a note explaining the division.
  • Note the maintenance basis somewhere durable. A licence, lease or informal arrangement can change, and the next clerk will want to know on what footing the council was cutting that grass.