Subsidence alerts for landlords

Why this matters for landlords

• Standard buildings insurance covers subsidence, but insurers scrutinise timing and evidence closely. Excesses are often around £1,000 (ABI), and reporting late can complicate a claim.
• If you're managing several older properties, or anything on clay soil, you're carrying this risk across every site at once. You're often not there between tenancies to spot the early signs.
• Mature trees within about 15m of a property push the risk up further, through root water uptake. And a past subsidence claim on a property is a strong predictor it'll happen again.

How we detect it

We model soil moisture deficit for the property's own location, using the same water-balance approach agronomists and hydrologists use. The threshold we compare it against is drawn from the nearest of 10 UK locations we've backtested against 51 years of real weather (1975–2025), not one flat number for the whole UK, and checked against known insurer-reported drought years.

Full methodology, including the backtesting and where the evidence is strongest and weakest, is on the how it works page.

What to do when you get this alert

• Keep the alert email. The date it arrived is a useful record if a claim ever needs to establish when conditions turned risky.
• Look for early physical signs at the property: diagonal cracking wider than about 3mm, or doors and windows that have started sticking.
• If the property is flagged for clay soil or mature trees nearby, treat any escalation alert (a deepening deficit) seriously rather than waiting for visible damage.
• Contact the property's insurer promptly if you see physical signs, or flag it to the owner so they can. Most policies expect early notification.
• Use the Property Risk Report at renewal, or if a claim becomes necessary, as a dated, sourced record of the conditions leading up to it.

Further reading

• Is subsidence covered by landlord insurance? What UK portfolio landlords need to know
• Dry summers and clay soil: how subsidence risk builds over a season