Empty homes hit a decade high - and unoccupied property cover is becoming a real broker growth line

There are now roughly 750,000 homes standing empty across the UK - the highest total in more than 10 years - and new analysis suggests a large chunk of their owners have no idea that their ordinary buildings or landlord policy stopped protecting them weeks ago.

The data, compiled by digital broker Ceta Insurance, part of the Atec Group, comes from almost 2,000 live unoccupied property policies with a combined rebuild value north of £720 million. Rather than just totting up a national figure, Ceta went a layer deeper and mapped where the risk actually sits by postcode - and the results point squarely away from the cities.

Wales took five of the top seven postcode areas in Ceta's league table. Hebden Bridge and Darwen, both in the Pennines, also featured heavily, while rural and coastal pockets of Norfolk, Northumberland, Cornwall and County Durham rounded out the top 10. In other words, this isn't primarily a London or Manchester problem - it's rural and coastal Britain carrying the bulk of the exposure, often in areas where flood, storm and subsidence risk is already elevated.

(Ceta has published the ranked findings but not exact postcode-level rankings publicly, so the table above reflects the areas it named rather than a precise order beyond the top seven.)

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Why the 30-60 day cliff-edge catches people out

The mechanics of the problem are simple - most standard home and landlord policies only cover a property for somewhere between 30 and 60 days of vacancy before cover is restricted or withdrawn altogether. Miss that window - whether because a house is going through probate, sitting on the market longer than expected, mid-renovation, or simply between tenants - and an owner can find out the hard way, at claims stage, that they were never really covered at all.

Ceta pointed to a long list of those everyday reasons a property ends up empty for longer than a standard policy allows: inheritance and probate delays, second homes and holiday lets sitting idle out of season, renovation projects that overrun, repairs following a flood, fire or escape of water, a sluggish sales market, longer void periods between tenancies, and an ageing population leaving properties unoccupied while care or family arrangements are sorted out. None of that is exotic - it's the ordinary stuff of everyday property ownership, which is exactly why the exposure is so widespread and so easily missed.

Government figures back up the broad picture. Note the scope difference: Ceta's 750,000 figure covers the whole UK, while the comparison data below is England-only - but even on that narrower base, the trend lines match. England alone recorded 676,304 empty homes in October 2022 according to the House of Commons Library, with roughly a third classed as long-term vacant, and more recent council tax data cited by industry analysts puts English unoccupied homes at 754,264 for 2025. Ceta's UK-wide estimate sits comfortably within the range other sources are showing.

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From niche add-on to mainstream growth line

What might be more interesting to brokers than the postcode list itself is the growth curve sitting behind it. Ceta said its own sales of unoccupied property insurance in 2025 were 500% higher than in 2020, with conversion rates up roughly fivefold over the same period. That chimes with wider Atec Group data suggesting quotations for this type of cover have surged since 2020 as vacancy periods stretch out across the market.

Ceta also cited research suggesting three quarters of  brokers (75%) now see unoccupied property as an important growth opportunity, rather than the awkward, hard-to-place risk it was once treated as.

Harry Peters, business-to-business operations manager at Ceta, said the exercise was the first time an insurer had mapped precisely where the UK's biggest unoccupied-home risks sit, and how exposed owners across the country are to the range of vulnerabilities that come with a vacant property. He said a large proportion of owners were likely completely unaware of the risk they were carrying, with a standard policy's inadequacy only surfacing when they tried to make a claim.

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Peters added that the data told a bigger story too - that what used to be viewed as a niche insurance product is becoming increasingly mainstream, and that intermediaries with the right partner behind them are well placed to raise unoccupied cover proactively with clients, both protecting those clients from a real financial risk and setting themselves apart as advisers who spot problems before they become claims disputes.

Ceta isn't the only new entrant treating this as a distinct growth segment rather than a hard-to-place afterthought. MGA Elitium, which launched in February 2026 to write well-maintained unoccupied residential and commercial property alongside a manufacturing book, has built its pitch around exactly this gap between automated portals and the judgement-based underwriting that vacant risk often needs.

Co-CEO Leah Miller said brokers come to specialist MGAs precisely because "their clients don't fit neatly into automated systems," adding that the firm's role is "to listen, advise and build cover that genuinely works in practice, not just in theory." It's a different business to Ceta's digital-broker model, but the underlying signal is the same: capacity is being built specifically for this risk, not bolted on as an exception.

A broker opportunity, not just a compliance headache

For brokers, the read-across is fairly direct. Unoccupied property has typically been treated as a specialist referral - something to place with an MGA once a client mentions a house has been empty a while - rather than a line to proactively flag. Ceta's numbers suggest that's changing, and the wider market backs that up: specialist and MGA business has been taking a growing share of UK distribution activity this year, with private equity money continuing to back specialty and MGA capacity even as overall broker deal volumes cool.

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The practical takeaway sits at renewal and new-business conversations. A client who mentions probate, a stalled sale, a long void period or a lengthy renovation is flagging an unoccupancy risk whether they realise it or not - and a quick conversation about specialist cover, or an extension, could be the difference between a smooth claim and a declined one further down the line. With overall property claims already running at record levels industry-wide, an easily-missed coverage gap like this is not one brokers will want to be explaining away after the event.

Four questions worth asking at renewal

• Has the property been empty, or is it likely to be empty, for more than 30 consecutive days at any point this year?
• What's the reason - probate, sale, renovation, holiday let, void period - and does it fall inside or outside the current policy's unoccupancy limit?
• Are the standard conditions (regular inspections, drained-down systems, secured openings) realistically achievable, or does the client need a policy built around how the property is actually being managed?
• If the answer to any of the above is "possibly," is that worth flagging now, rather than waiting for it to surface at claims stage?