Are Landlords Really Leaving? What Net Formation Says

Ask the internet whether landlords are leaving the UK market and you get survey results. Someone polled several hundred landlords, a share of them said they intended to sell, and that share became a headline. Intentions are not transactions, and the sample is rarely the market.

There is a harder source sitting in the open. Companies House records every property company that comes into existence and every one that is struck off, with dates, and it is free to query. Netting the two gives a monthly reading of whether the property company population is growing or shrinking. Over the twelve settled months to June 2026 it grew by 44,768 companies, on 90,390 incorporations against 45,622 dissolutions. That is the number this page is built around, and it comes from the UK SPV Incorporation Index, our monthly count of UK property company formations.

What net formation actually measures

Net formation is simple arithmetic: incorporations in a month, minus dissolutions in that month, across the four real-estate SIC codes the Index tracks (68209, 68100, 68320 and 68201, counted once each as a deduplicated union). Dissolutions are dated by when the company was struck off, not by when it was formed, so this is a measure of change in the live population rather than of how any single cohort fared.

It matters because gross incorporations, quoted alone, are misread constantly. A fall in new formations gets reported as a shrinking sector, when it may only mean the sector is growing more slowly. Net formation removes that ambiguity in one subtraction.

The last twelve settled months, month by month

Every figure below is the deduplicated union across the four codes. The series stops at June 2026 because the two most recent months are provisional and excluded from headline figures, as the Index methodology requires.

Month	Incorporations	Dissolutions	Net formation
July 2025	8,304	4,719	+3,585
August 2025	7,644	3,314	+4,330
September 2025	9,035	4,251	+4,784
October 2025	8,777	2,998	+5,779
November 2025	6,796	3,274	+3,522
December 2025	5,758	4,230	+1,528
January 2026	8,223	3,730	+4,493
February 2026	7,474	4,122	+3,352
March 2026	8,423	4,298	+4,125
April 2026	6,936	3,630	+3,306
May 2026	6,406	3,917	+2,489
June 2026	6,614	3,139	+3,475
Twelve months to June 2026	90,390	45,622	+44,768

Not one month in the window is negative. The weakest was December 2025 at +1,528, and December is always the weakest month in this series because incorporations dip sharply around the turn of the calendar year. The strongest was October 2025 at +5,779.

By quarter the shape is clearer still: +12,699 in Q3 2025, +10,829 in Q4 2025, +11,970 in Q1 2026 and +9,270 in Q2 2026. The trend is downward, from roughly 12,700 a quarter to roughly 9,300, and it is still comfortably above zero.

So why does it feel like an exodus?

Because the other half of the data is real too, and it is the half that makes headlines. Three things are genuinely falling.

• Gross formations are down year on year. The 90,390 incorporations in the twelve months to June 2026 compare with 92,833 in the twelve months before, a fall of 2.6%.
• The headline buy-to-let code is off its peak. SIC 68209 recorded 4,840 incorporations in June 2026, against 6,054 in June 2025, down 20.1%. The peak single month in the whole series was September 2025 at 6,672. On a trailing twelve-month basis the same code is much steadier, 66,312 against 66,828, a fall of just 0.8%.
• Dissolutions are rising fast. 45,622 in the twelve months to June 2026 against 36,494 the year before, up 25.0%. This is the line doing most of the work: it is why net formation fell from +56,339 to +44,768, a drop of 20.5%, even though incorporations barely moved.

Set against the decade behind it, that cooling is small. Annual formations roughly tripled between 2016 and 2025, a run charted year by year in what Section 24 actually did to company formations, and the population those years built is still on the register.

A market where arrivals are flat and exits are up a quarter feels like it is emptying, and it is fair to call that a cooling. It is not the same as a shrinking population, and only the net series can tell the two apart.

Individual landlords and company landlords are not the same people

The single most common error in this debate is treating the register as a landlord headcount. It is not. Two separate populations are moving in opposite directions, and both movements are consistent with the data.

On one side, individual owners of personally-held property have been selling. Published market research puts landlord exits during 2025 at around 93,000, with only about 4% of those exiting buying again, so a real and substantial withdrawal is happening among personal owners. None of it touches Companies House, because a personally-held flat sold by its owner leaves no corporate trace.

On the other side, the landlords still buying are overwhelmingly buying through companies. Published industry estimates put roughly 75% to 80% of new buy-to-let purchases through a corporate structure, and Hamptons, whose separate quarterly count is the best known series in this space, describes company formation as levelling off at around 4,000 to 5,000 a month rather than falling away.

Put the two together and the picture is not an exodus but a sorting. Casual and accidental landlords are leaving. Committed investors are staying and restructuring, which is why the company count keeps rising while the landlord count falls. If you are weighing that decision, the mechanics sit in our guide to incorporating a property portfolio, and the timing question in when to incorporate.

What this data cannot tell you

The Index methodology is published in full precisely so its limits are visible, and three of them bear directly on the exodus question.

• A company is not a property. One SPV may hold a single flat or fifty units, and the register does not say which. So 44,768 net new companies is not 44,768 net new rental homes. Anyone converting one into the other, in either direction, is inventing a multiplier.
• SIC codes are self-reported. They record the incorporator's stated intent at formation and are rarely revised, so the headline series is a lower bound on buy-to-let formation rather than a census. Property held through limited liability partnerships is effectively invisible, because LLPs rarely file SIC codes at all.
• Dissolution is not failure. A struck-off company may have sold its property, been consolidated into a group, or simply been formed and never used. The register records the closure, not the reason, so a rise in dissolutions is a signal to investigate rather than a conclusion.

For scale, the September 2026 bulk snapshot of the live register carries 665,645 companies under these four codes, a stock we break down by region and vintage in how many buy-to-let limited companies there are in the UK. The twelve-month net gain of 44,768 is meaningful growth on that base, and the company is now the primary structure through which new UK rental property is bought.

The short answer

Fewer landlords are arriving than at the 2025 peak, more companies are closing than a year ago, and the property company population is still growing by tens of thousands a year. Anyone quoting only the first two facts is describing an exodus that the register does not show. Anyone quoting only the third is ignoring a genuine cooling.

If the aggregate has you reconsidering your own structure, the arithmetic that decides it is personal rather than national. Start with the SPV company hub for what the vehicle does and does not achieve, the cost of forming an SPV for the entry price, and the annual running cost budget for what it costs to keep. The full monthly series behind this page, including the regional split and a CSV download, sits on the UK SPV Incorporation Index, and the underlying data is published by Companies House under the Open Government Licence v3.0.