UK Real Estate Letting and Investment Insolvency Statistics

There were 136 real estate letting and investment insolvencies between January and June 2026, against 151 in the same six months of 2025, a fall of 9.9%. Real estate activities as a whole rose sharply, by 50.8%, from 398 to 600.

That section-level rise is not a story about landlords: the Insolvency Service’s own commentary for spring 2026 flagged around 200 connected companies entering administration together, concentrated almost entirely in companies that buy and sell property in their own name, not in this trade. These are Company Debt calculations from Insolvency Service Table A1b data.

The rolling 12-month figure confirms this trade’s own, much calmer picture: 274 cases for the year to June 2026 against 280 a year earlier, down a modest 2.1%.

Real estate letting and investment, the largest single trade in its section at 37% of the total, is not where the section’s headline number is coming from.

Real estate letting and investment insolvencies were choppy before the pandemic, 149 in 2016 dropping to 106 in 2017, before climbing to 179 by 2019. 2020 brought a fall to 140, in line with government support and restricted winding-up petitions holding the normal insolvency cycle back across the economy.

The rise from there has been sustained. 176 in 2021, 242 in 2022, 277 in 2023, then a pull-back to 236 in 2024, before a fresh rise to 289 in 2025, the series high. Unlike some trades on this site, this one has not settled into a clean plateau: it keeps setting new highs after brief pauses.

289 in 2025 sits 62% above 2019, and the pattern of the last three years, a fall then a new peak, suggests the pressure on real estate letting and investment companies has not fully worked its way through the system.

In the real estate letting cases we see, the trigger is almost always a refinancing date, not a sudden loss of tenants. A portfolio can be fully let and still fail a lender’s renewed stress test, because the test itself, not the rent roll, is what has changed since the loan was first written.

Personal guarantees are common in this trade, particularly on smaller portfolios, and they are rarely the first thing a director raises on a call. They are almost always the thing that has actually been keeping them awake, because a company insolvency does not, on its own, end a director’s personal exposure on a guaranteed facility.

Void periods matter more than they used to. A unit standing empty for a few months used to be an inconvenience; against a tightly stress-tested loan, it can be the difference between a refinancing that clears and one that does not.

We would not start with the rent roll. We would look at when the next refinancing or lease expiry falls, what the loan-to-value position looks like against a realistic current valuation, what EPC and compliance costs are outstanding across the portfolio, and what is owed to HMRC.

A landlord with a sound, well-let portfolio and a genuinely difficult refinancing date usually has more options than the loan terms alone suggest, an extension, a partial disposal, or restructuring finance, provided the conversation with a lender and an adviser starts well before the maturity date arrives.

The official commentary for spring 2026 flagged that around 200 connected real estate companies entered administration across March and April. That figure covers the whole real estate section, and it should not be read as a wave of landlord or property-investor failures.

The industry data show the spike was concentrated mainly in companies that buy and sell property in their own name, not in companies that hold property to rent it out.

SIC group 682 covers companies whose recorded primary business is renting and operating property they own or lease to others: commercial and residential landlords and property-investment companies. Companies that buy and sell property in their own name, and estate agencies acting for clients on a fee basis, are recorded under separate codes within the same section.

This is the largest single trade in the real estate section, at 37% of the section’s insolvencies, but it was not the source of the large spring 2026 spike in the section total; that was concentrated in property-trading companies (SIC 681), covered above.

These are company counts, not the number of properties, units or tenants affected. A single insolvent company may hold one property or an entire portfolio.

The figures are insolvency volumes, not a failure rate. They are not adjusted for the number of active real estate letting and investment companies, so a rising count does not, on its own, prove a rising rate of failure.

The SIC 682 figures come from Table A1b and are not seasonally adjusted. The latest month is provisional and can be revised.

None of the figures above decide whether a particular landlord or property company is viable. What matters is narrower: what the loan-to-value position looks like at the next refinancing, what compliance costs remain outstanding, and what is genuinely owed to HMRC.

Plenty of letting and investment companies in difficulty are otherwise sound businesses carrying a refinancing-timing problem or a compliance cost they have not yet funded, and both are usually fixable if addressed early.

If you are reading this with a refinancing date approaching and the numbers do not work, the thing worth knowing is that the earlier you speak to someone, the more room there is to move: terms renegotiated with a lender, an HMRC Time to Pay arrangement, or a rescue procedure such as a Company Voluntary Arrangement or administration.

Once a winding-up petition is advertised, the bank account is usually frozen within days, and at that point creditors’ voluntary liquidation may be the only route still open. If you want to talk it through first, our insolvency advice for directors is the place to start.