Is there a list that has the name of owners of buildings?

No location has been provided. The answer will change depending on the country and maybe on the jurisdiction below that. In the US all property transactions are recorded if the parties are following normal procedures. A sale that is not recorded can be made void or otherwise be defective in some cases. Hence most parties to a transaction have incentive to see that it is property reordered. The recorder's office is at the county level. The listed name of the owner might be a trust, a company or other entity. You also can consult with the property tax records to see where the tax records are being sent. In the UK there is one central place and that is the Land Registry. Granted the records at the LR do not go back all that far and 50 percent of the total land mass in the UK is not in the LR records so far. More is being entered all the time. Other countries will mostly have something similar as there is a lot of value to having records that are held in a public form. There are many countries that have not moved to such a system or are at a very early stage.