The relationship between planning and property rights is both foundational and under-theorised, yet remains central to how land is governed, accessed, and contested. This paper offers a critical review of how property rights are conceptualised across ten major paradigms in planning theory, highlighting the silences, assumptions, and conceptual inconsistencies that shape this engagement. The paper reconceptualises property not as a static legal object but as a socially embedded and institutionally mediated arrangement of entitlements, obligations, and exclusions. The paper employs five analytical lenses: how property is conceptualised; how ownership and the public–private boundary are understood; how roles are assigned to key actors; how power and spatial justice are addressed; and how planning practices actively transform property rights through regulatory, administrative, and institutional intervention. It then systematically compares how different planning paradigms engage with property rights. The comparative analysis shows that while some paradigms, i.e., Marxist, Coasian, and neoliberal planning, foreground property as a structuring force, others, particularly rational, incremental, and collaborative approaches, treat it as a background constraint or overlook it entirely. These divergent orientations shape how planning is theorised as a mode of governance, particularly in relation to land commodification, state authority, and socio-spatial inequality. The paper concludes by calling for a more explicit theorisation of property within planning thought, arguing that planning theory must move beyond procedural concerns to engage more directly with the institutional and distributive dimensions of planning. The paper contributes to a growing agenda linking planning with questions of ownership, justice, and institutional transformation.