The UK Property Distress Index.

Every month, UK companies that own real property go into receivership, get wound up, or get struck off - and their titles quietly become tomorrow's distressed deals. The data is all public (Companies House, The Gazette, HM Land Registry), but nobody joins it up and publishes it. So we do: receiver appointments, winding-up petitions and strike-off notices on property-owning companies, matched to registered titles, every month, free.

One rule governs every number in it: where coverage is partial we say so, and where there is no coverage we say "no coverage" - never a fake zero.

Issue #1 - May 2026

Baseline issue

This first issue is deliberately a baseline. Our Gazette feed went live on 4 June 2026 and our receiver detector has so far covered 12.9% of the tracked corpus - so May itself has partial or no event coverage, and we report it exactly that way. What we can publish honestly is the scale of what's now under monitoring, and what the feeds captured in their first days live. From the June issue you'll get the full monthly numbers with regional breakdowns.

4,504,327
registered titles under daily monitoring (HMLR CCOD/OCOD, England & Wales)
4,047
property-owning companies under full Companies House distress monitoring
127
winding-up petitions captured in the Gazette feed's first six days live (4-9 June 2026)

Feed-to-date: Gazette corporate-insolvency capture (4-9 June 2026)

These are not May figures - they are everything captured since the official-notice feed went live, published so the baseline is on the record before the first fully-covered issue.

Notice typeGazette codeNotices since live
Administration appointments241024
Creditors' voluntary liquidations2441213
Creditors' voluntary liquidations (resolutions)2443225
Winding-up petitions2450127
Total589

Winding-up petitions are the leading indicator: they are gazetted weeks before the insolvency event itself, which is what makes them worth watching at the petition stage rather than waiting for a status change.

What we are NOT claiming this month

  • Receiver appointments in May: the detector has so far run on 522 of 4,047 tracked owners (12.9%) and found none in that subset - so the figure is a floor on a partial scan, not a total.
  • Winding-up petitions in May: no coverage - the Gazette feed went live 4 June 2026, so May is reported as not covered rather than as zero petitions.
  • Strike-offs, MEES exposure and equity bands: detectors live but not yet run corpus-wide - reported as no coverage rather than padded.

Methodology, briefly

Receiver appointments come from Companies House filing-history receiver-appointment events, deduplicated per company and dated by the appointment filing. Winding-up petitions and other insolvency notices come from The Gazette's official notice feed (corporate-insolvency codes only), dated by publication. Everything is joined to the 4,504,327 registered titles in HM Land Registry's CCOD/OCOD datasets. Equity figures, when they appear in future issues, are modelled - Companies House does not publish loan balances - and will always be labelled modelled. Filings lag the underlying events by days to weeks, and a petition can be dismissed or withdrawn: it is a leading indicator, not a confirmed insolvency.

Sources & licences: Companies House (Companies House licence) · The Gazette - contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 · HM Land Registry CCOD/OCOD - data produced by HM Land Registry © Crown copyright · EPC register (DLUHC). Geography: England & Wales (HMLR scope); company and insolvency notices are UK-wide.

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