Property
across the UK.

5,697 new property companies registered at Companies House in August 2026, and 84,970 over the last twelve months across the 2 trades in this family. That is about 233 a day, somewhere in the country.

Register snapshot 1 September 2026. A monthly snapshot, not a live feed. How the counts are made.

Property · United KingdomAugust 2026
New in August
5,697
Across 2 trades in this family
Last 12 months
84,970
Sep 2025 – Aug 2026 · 7,081 a month
Share of all new companies
16.5%
84,970 of the 515,810 companies counted across all 39 trades in the last twelve months. That makes this the number 3 of the five families.
Source: Companies HouseSnapshot 1 September 2026
Sep 2025 – Aug 2026

Property investment & letting leads the family.

The 2 trades grouped into property, busiest first. Property investment & letting took 64,874 of the 84,970 counted here over the last twelve months, 76% of the family on its own. Each trade opens on its own page, broken down town by town.

New UK company registrations in the property family, by trade. The bar shows the twelve-month figure relative to property investment & letting, the busiest trade in the family.
Trade Aug 2026 Last 12 months Relative twelve-month volume
Property investment & letting 4,284 64,874
Property management 1,413 20,096
Property, all 2 trades 5,697 84,970

The families are ours, not the register's: they exist so the colour on every chart means something. A company carrying more than one SIC code can land in more than one trade, so the rows above can count the same company twice and the family total is a total of the rows rather than a headcount of companies. The grouping is set out in full on the method page, SIC code by SIC code.

Twelve months

September was the busiest month.

New property companies registered across the UK each month. The busiest month was September on 8,818. The quietest was December on 5,450.

New property companies in the UK, by month

Sep 2025 – Aug 2026 · 84,970 in total

Previous months August 2026

Registrations dip over Christmas and pick up in the new year in almost every trade, so compare a month with the same month a year earlier rather than with the one before it.

2015 to 2026

How far back it goes.

Property companies still on the register, by year of incorporation, and the like-for-like comparison underneath: the first 8 months of 2026 against the same 8 months of 2025.

New property companies in the UK, by year

2015 to 2026 · 2026 counts January to August only

Complete years 2026, part year
January to August 2026 55,573 New property companies so far this year
Same months, 2025 59,547 Down 7% year on year
2025, the last full year 88,944 Against 17,433 in 2015

Older years undercount. The register only holds companies that still exist. Anything formed in an earlier year and since dissolved has dropped off it, so the further back the chart goes the more it undercounts. That alone makes every trade look like it is growing. Some of the rise here is real growth and some of it is simply that recent companies have had less time to close. The long view of UK company formation takes the same problem apart across all 39 trades.

The like-for-like measure inside the family: January to August 2026 against the same months of 2025. Both runs of months are equally recent, so neither has had longer to lose companies off the register.
Trade Change Jan–Aug 2025 Jan–Aug 2026
Property investment & letting Down 6% 45,051 42,220
Property management Down 8% 14,496 13,353

0 of the 2 trades in this family registered more companies in the first 8 months of 2026 than in the same months of 2025; 2 registered fewer. Property management moved most on the way down, at 8%.

Sep 2025 – Aug 2026

Where property firms are starting.

New property companies registered over the last twelve months, by the post town on the registered office address, or, where that office is a formation agent, by the town the company's directors run their other companies from.

The outlier 12,589 London

London is counted as a single post town, so it is not really in the same contest as the rest of the list. It took 5.3 times as many new property companies last year as Birmingham. Leaving it in the ranking below would squash every other bar to a stub, so it sits up here on its own.

2,361 Birmingham, the next town down, reaches the white mark 12,589 London, the whole bar

Ranked 2 to 16, without London

Bars scaled to Birmingham at 2,361, not to London

02 Birmingham 2,361
03 Manchester 2,152
04 Glasgow 1,249
05 Leicester 1,042
06 Nottingham 1,016
07 Leeds 975
08 Liverpool 948
09 Bristol 935
10 Ilford 858
11 Sheffield 663
12 Edinburgh 645
13 Slough 562
14 Harrow 542
15 Cardiff 535
16 Coventry 518

Each town above links to its busiest property trade there where that pairing has enough volume for a page, and to the town itself where it does not. Every town counted, ranked and linked.