Attacks on property firms rose 17% in 2025. Insurance uptake didn’t keep pace.
Cyber insurance penetration among UK real estate and renting businesses sits below the wider SME market at every size band, according to GlobalData’s Q1 2025 UK SME Insurance Survey, even as cyberattacks against property services firms rose 17% in 2025.
The gap is widest among the smallest firms. Just 7.7% of sole traders in the sector hold cyber insurance, against 13.1% across the SME market as a whole. Among micro businesses, penetration is 15.8%, compared with 26.4% more broadly; among small businesses it is 20.5% against 40.1%; and among medium-sized firms it’s 55.0% against 63%.
The pattern holds at every size tier — property businesses are consistently less insured against cyber risk than SMEs generally, and the proportional gap narrows only as firms get larger.
Why property specifically carries this exposure
Figures sourced from the Information Commissioner’s Office showed cyberattacks against UK property services businesses rose from 178 incidents in 2024 to 208 in 2025. Property firms routinely handle sensitive customer data, including bank details, mortgage information, tenancy records, proof of address, passports and driving licences, gathered for AML and KYC checks, identity verification and standard transaction processing.
That combination of high-value data and comparatively low insurance uptake is what GlobalData says leaves a significant share of the sector financially exposed.
The risk extends beyond straightforward data theft. Criminals who gain access to transaction data can carry out payment diversion fraud, substituting their own bank details for a legitimate party’s during a property purchase. City of London Police and Action Fraud recorded 143 cases of conveyancing fraud between April 2024 and March 2025, resulting in £11.7 million in losses, with the vast majority of cases involving residential transactions and an average loss of £78,393 per case.
Businesses becoming increasingly reliant on digital systems
Charlie Hutcherson, senior insurance analyst at GlobalData, said property businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on digital systems while continuing to hold large volumes of sensitive personal and financial information, creating a broad cyber risk that extends beyond data breaches into fraud, business interruption and potentially significant recovery costs. He said cyber insurance uptake across the sector hasn’t kept pace with that exposure, particularly among smaller firms.
Hutcherson said this represents a genuine opportunity for insurers to address an increasingly visible protection gap, though improving understanding of cyber risk among property businesses will need to go hand in hand with making cover itself easier to understand and access. He said smaller firms may not fully recognise the financial impact of a cyber incident until one actually occurs, giving brokers and insurers an important role in demonstrating how insurance sits alongside cybersecurity measures rather than replacing the need for them.
He added that as property transactions and customer interactions become increasingly digital, cyber exposure in the sector is unlikely to shrink, and that rising attack volumes combined with comparatively low insurance penetration could push more businesses toward absorbing cyber losses themselves. Insurers able to improve awareness, simplify distribution and demonstrate the practical value of cyber cover, he said, have a real opportunity to grow penetration in an underserved part of the SME market.
A pattern consistent with GlobalData’s wider SME cyber research
This sector-specific finding sits within a broader pattern GlobalData has documented across UK SMEs generally.
Separate GlobalData research has found cyber insurance penetration rising sharply with firm size across the whole SME population, from 13.1% among sole traders to 63% among medium-sized firms, meaning the smallest companies, which typically also have the weakest cyber controls and least capacity to absorb a loss, remain consistently the least protected group regardless of sector.
Property’s own figures sit below even those already-low general SME benchmarks at every size tier, suggesting the sector faces a compounded version of a gap that already exists across UK small business more broadly.
What makes the property sector’s gap notable isn’t just that cyber cover is underpenetrated, that’s true of UK SMEs generally, but that the sector combines unusually sensitive data holdings with a below-average insurance safety net at every stage of business growth. A sole trader property services firm is nearly twice as likely to go without cyber cover as the average UK sole trader, at exactly the point in a property transaction, handling a buyer’s passport, bank details and mortgage paperwork, where a breach or fraud attempt would do the most damage.
For brokers serving this sector, that combination of elevated data sensitivity and below-benchmark coverage across every business size is a fairly direct case for proactive outreach, rather than waiting for renewal conversations to surface the gap.