Property businesses accounted for one in six solvent company closures in the week before last year’s Autumn Budget as owners rushed to complete liquidations ahead of the fiscal statement.
Analysis by insolvency firm Clarke Bell shows 54 real estate companies passed Members’ Voluntary Liquidation (MVL) resolutions in the five working days before the Budget on 26 November 2025.
That represented 17% of all MVL resolutions during the period, almost double the sector’s usual share of around 10%.
Activity then dropped sharply, with just six real estate MVL resolutions recorded in the five working days following the Budget – an 89% fall. The findings come ahead of the next Budget on 28 October.
LETTING COMPANIES
Letting businesses accounted for a significant proportion of the pre-Budget activity.
Some 34 companies classified as letting or operating their own or leased real estate passed MVL resolutions during the five working days before the Budget, compared with just five in the equivalent period afterwards.
They represented 10.7% of all MVLs immediately before the Budget, against a more typical share of 5.7%.
The businesses involved also tended to be well established. Letting companies going through an MVL had a median age of 21.9 years – the oldest of the 20 sectors analysed by Clarke Bell and almost a decade above the 12.1-year average across all MVLs.
An MVL is used to close a solvent company that can pay its debts in full, allowing remaining assets to be distributed to shareholders. The figures therefore do not represent insolvencies, business failures or evidence that landlords sold properties.
BUDGET EFFECT
Clarke Bell says the November 2025 spike was unusual for the property sector.
Ahead of the October 2024 Budget and Business Asset Disposal Relief increases in April 2025 and April 2026, real estate’s share of MVLs remained broadly in line with or below its usual level.
November 2025 was markedly different. Real estate companies passed 97 MVL resolutions across the month, compared with 47 in October, 51 in December and just 24 in November 2024.
However, the data cannot establish why individual shareholders chose to liquidate companies at a particular time or whether anticipated tax changes influenced their decisions.
John Bell (main picture), Senior Partner and Licensed Insolvency Practitioner at Clarke Bell, says: “The data cannot tell us why any individual shareholder acted when they did, but the timing is hard to ignore.
“With another Budget approaching, the previous three events show just how sharply behaviour can become concentrated around known fiscal deadlines.”
