UK property trading: turnover is whatever sold this year

About 1,078 UK property-trading companies publish a full profit-and-loss — the companies whose business is buying and selling real estate they own, rather than letting it or building it — and together they book £16.3bn of turnover. But this is the lumpiest P&L in the economy: a trading company’s revenue is not a run-rate, it’s a diary of what happened to complete that year, so a +10,000% growth figure usually means one site finally sold, and a zero usually means the next one hasn’t yet. The headline numbers need even more care than that, because the top of the map is barely trading at all — the two largest entries are the same volume housebuilder counted twice, at group and at subsidiary, and between them they are a third of the entire mapped turnover. Strip the housebuilders out and the genuine trade appears: patient dealers in tenanted homes and promoted land, plus several thousand single-project vehicles waiting for their one disposal. Figures are approximate — verify against a company’s own accounts before relying on any single number. They are also only part of the picture: for every company on this map, roughly ten more trade behind accounts too abbreviated to show any revenue or profit at all.

Read the names first

“Buying and selling of own real estate” is a label housebuilders can wear with a straight face — selling homes you built is, technically, selling your own real estate — and the top of the table is where they wear it. Vistry Group, the listed partnerships housebuilder, files here at £3.78bn; so does Vistry Homes, its principal operating subsidiary, at £1.69bn — the same houses, counted again. Both rows are FY2024 accounts; the group has since filed FY2025 (£3.61bn of revenue, £196.2M pre-tax profit), so read the pair as a matched-period snapshot, not the latest word. Below the housebuilders sit a builders’ merchant, a housing association’s development arm and, most decisively mis-filed of all, a care operator with 3,888 staff. Exclude them all from any competitive read of the trading market — we do, throughout this report.

The headcounts give the game away, exactly as they did on the letting map. A property trader doesn’t need 3,888 people — Ivolve is a care group in a property wrapper. It doesn’t need 510 either — E H Smith sells building materials, at a merchant’s 3% margin. The heavy loss in the table is a housebuilder’s, not a trader’s — and it’s an exit loss, not a business bleeding: St. Modwen Homes posted a £213.6M pre-tax loss on £285M of sales in its final accounts before Blackstone’s sale of the business to Miller Homes completed in February 2025. That filing covers a 16-month period, and the loss is dominated by a £175.3M write-down crystallised on transferring its land bank to Miller Homes at below book value — a one-off the accounts themselves explain. And two of the biggest rows resist identification altogether: Leathbond — £255.6M of revenue, a 68% margin, and almost no public footprint — and Gjs Holdco, whose +127% jump is almost certainly deal timing rather than growth. On this register, a nine-figure property business can still be effectively anonymous.

Margin is not margin here

Three revenue models share this label, and comparing margins across them is meaningless:

• Trading — buy a building or a site, sell it for more. Revenue is the gross disposal proceeds; the margin is the dealer’s spread, and it arrives in lumps. A good trading business runs anywhere from high-teens to ~40%, entirely depending on what completed this year.
• Housebuilding — the Vistry rows and their peers. Volume housebuilding is a low-single-digit-margin business (Vistry Group FY2024: 2.8%; its since-filed FY2025 accounts show 5.4%); it belongs on the developers map, not here.
• Rent and revaluation — plenty of companies filed here are really landlords, and their 60–90% “margins” are rental economics plus paper gains, covered properly in the landlords report.

The trap that spans all three: profit here is flattered by gains that aren’t trading. Revaluation gains on investment property and one-off disposal surpluses land in the profit line without any repeatable business behind them — that is how a company later in this report prints a 93.7% margin. The same ex-revaluation discipline we applied to the landlords applies here: treat any margin above ~60% as rent, revaluation or an intra-group arrangement until proven otherwise, and read trading businesses on their disposal spread, not their headline profit.

What a real property trader looks like

Filter to genuine operators — £5M–£100M turnover, profitable, ≥10% margin, captives and extraction outliers excluded — and the archetype of the trade emerges. Mountview Estates has been running the same model since the 1930s: buy residential property subject to regulated tenancies at a discount to vacant-possession value, collect the rent, and sell each home at full value when it falls vacant. £72.1M of revenue, £31.3M of pre-tax profit, ~30 staff — a 43% margin earned on patience measured in decades. The other pure-trading model in the table is land promotion: Gladman Developments (£38.6M, 19.7%, part of Barratt since 2022) options farmland, wins planning permission, and sells the consented land — trading in planning uplift rather than bricks.

…and 10 more £5M–£100M operators clear the same bar, including Gladman Developments (19.7%), Housing Gateway (13.7%) and Derwent Valley Central (63.9% — a Derwent London subsidiary, so read that margin as rent under a trading label).

Even inside the filtered table, the models sort themselves by staff count and margin. The near-staffless 60–80% rows are rent collectors parked under a trading label — Proudreed (11 staff, 60.8%) is an industrial landlord, Supermarket Income Investments (Midco6)‘s 79.7% in the wider list is a REIT subsidiary’s rent, and even NewRiver REIT — an actual listed REIT — files here. The retirement-housebuilder captive (McCarthy & Stone Extra Care — an arm of McCarthy Stone, the private retirement housebuilder owned by Lone Star since 2021) and the housing-association development arms (Home Group, Network Homes) are build-to-tenure vehicles, not traders. What’s left — Mountview, Gladman, and a handful of family vehicles — is the real trade, and it is strikingly small next to the label that contains it: patient, thin on people, and rich in judgement about what a building or a field will be worth to somebody else.

The shape of the market: a waiting room, not a graveyard

Half the map — 540 companies — books under £1M of turnover, and only 38% of that band is profitable. On most markets we’d call that a struggling tail. Here it’s mostly a waiting room: a trading vehicle between disposals has no revenue this year, not no business. Profitability climbs with scale — 53% in the £1–5M band, 69% at £5–25M, 70% at £25–100M, 80% above that — partly because bigger books mean something completes most years, smoothing the diary into something that looks like a run-rate. The £1bn+ band contains two companies, and they are the same housebuilder.

Growth is a diary of disposals

Nothing in the growth table is market share changing hands. When your revenue is whatever completed, “growth” is a site reaching the point of sale: Hargreaves Services (Blindwells) — the vehicle selling serviced land at the Blindwells new settlement in East Lothian — grew +10,449% to £13.8M because land parcels started completing, not because anything about the business changed. St Francis Group 2’s +7,775% at a 93.7% margin has the shape of a one-off disposal gain landing in a quiet vehicle, exactly the flattery flagged earlier. The rows to actually worry about are the loss-makers ramping: Pegasus Homes turned £5.3M of revenue into a £19.6M loss while cutting staff — a retirement-housing business selling at a heavy loss is a very different story from a trader between deals.

Market structure: concentration that isn’t there

On paper this looks like a concentrated market — the top 5 hold 40.2% of the mapped turnover. In practice the top 5 is five housebuilders, one of them twice: the two Vistry entities alone (both FY2024 accounts) are £5.5bn of the £16.3bn map, and removing the double-counted subsidiary shrinks the “market” to about £14.6bn before you even ask whether housebuilding belongs here at all. Strip the housebuilders from the top and the trading market proper looks like its letting cousin: a long, flat curve of family vehicles, single-scheme companies and holdcos, with no national champion of buying low and selling high — because judgement about individual buildings doesn’t scale the way a brand or a network does.

Old money, new vehicles

The vintage profile is two markets in one chart. The head is old: 166 of the mapped companies predate 1990, and the archetypes are older still — Mountview has traded tenanted houses since before the war, and J F Ashton’s company number dates from the reign of George V. The tail is brand new: the 2016–20 cohort is the largest (306 companies), refilled by the deal-a-vehicle habit — each acquisition or scheme incorporated as its own company for financing and tax reasons — the same pattern that made the letting register so young. Ownership matches the structure: 646 of the 1,078 are owned by other companies against 342 by individuals, and about 14% carry Holdings/Topco/Bidco-style names — layered stacks built for a transaction, not shopfront businesses.

What the map shows

1. Read the names before the numbers. The top 5 “property traders” are all housebuilders — and the biggest, Vistry, appears twice, at group and subsidiary, a third of the whole map’s turnover on its own. A care operator and a builders’ merchant sit in the top 12.
2. Turnover here is a diary of disposals, not a run-rate. The growth table’s +10,449% is land parcels at one Scottish new town starting to sell; treat every YoY figure in this market as deal timing until proven otherwise.
3. Margin is not margin. Rent-and-revaluation rows print 60–90%; genuine trading runs high-teens to ~40% (Mountview’s 43% on ~30 staff is the ceiling, earned over decades); volume housebuilding is low single digits. Never compare across the three.
4. The real trade is small and patient. Strip the housebuilders, landlords and housing-association arms out of the best-run table and what remains — tenancy traders, land promoters, family vehicles — is a fraction of the label that contains it.
5. The sub-£1M band is a waiting room. 540 companies, 38% profitable — mostly vehicles between disposals, not failing businesses.
6. A nine-figure property business can still be anonymous. Two of the twelve biggest companies on the map resist identification from their accounts alone.

Methodology and caveats

This covers only the UK property-trading companies that publish a full profit-and-loss; roughly ten times as many companies carry the same classification but file accounts too abbreviated to show revenue or profit, so the mapped £16.3bn is a floor, not the market. Housebuilders, group holding companies and mis-labelled operating businesses are identified by name, headcount and disclosure and excluded from competitive reads, but some will have slipped through — treat any margin above ~60% and any four-digit headcount with suspicion. Profit figures can include property revaluation and one-off disposal gains, which are not repeatable trading income. Business-type labels are directional. Figures are approximate — this is analysis, not financial advice; verify any specific figure against the company’s own accounts before relying on it.