Mears lifts housing order book to £4.2bn

Mears Group has increased its forward order book to a record £4.2bn after securing and retaining a series of long-term housing maintenance contracts, with £1.438bn of workload scheduled for mobilisation during 2026.

The order book compares with £3.3bn at the same point last year, excluding the facilities management activities subsequently sold by the group. Around £3.3bn of the current total relates to maintenance-led services, increasing the contractor’s visibility across repairs, planned works, compliance, and wider housing investment programmes.

The largest new customer is Birmingham City Council, where Mears has secured a base contract worth an estimated £450m over ten years. The package covers approximately 11,500 homes in the council’s west-central area and includes responsive and void maintenance, gas servicing, heating installation, planned maintenance, and improvement work.

A second new relationship with Rooftop Housing Group carries an estimated £150m value over ten years and covers maintenance services to around 7,000 homes across South Worcestershire and North Gloucestershire.

Those awards sit alongside retained or expanded contracts with Livin, Cross Keys Homes, Leeds City Council, Moat Homes, and Thurrock Council. Together, the maintenance packages scheduled to start or remobilise in the current financial year carry annual revenue of approximately £179m and total contract value of £1.438bn.

The immediate delivery challenge is therefore mobilisation rather than tendering. Moving a housing maintenance contract between providers involves more than transferring a list of properties: labour, depots, materials, IT systems, resident contact processes, subcontractors, vehicle fleets, compliance records, and historical property data all need to function from the beginning of the new service.

That transition is particularly sensitive where responsive repairs and statutory servicing cannot pause while planned programmes are established. A new contractor may be taking over thousands of occupied homes while simultaneously recruiting or transferring staff, validating records, opening supply accounts, and integrating client systems.

Mears’ Birmingham contract demonstrates the breadth of those responsibilities. Responsive repairs sit alongside empty-property work, gas servicing, heating installations, planned maintenance, and improvements, creating several different construction and compliance workflows inside a single long-term relationship.

The supply-chain demand is similarly broad. Local and regional subcontractors may be needed across electrical work, roofing, plumbing, heating, decorating, damp remediation, adaptations, fire-related measures, and larger planned programmes, while merchants and product suppliers have to support repeated work across occupied properties rather than deliveries to one conventional site compound.

Mears has also been expanding its compliance capability following the acquisition of Pennington Choices. The integration is largely complete, extending the group’s professional and technical offer at a time when social landlords are under greater pressure to understand stock condition and demonstrate compliance across their portfolios.

That changes the nature of housing maintenance work. A responsive-repairs contract can no longer be viewed entirely separately from asset information, building safety, energy performance, damp and mould management, planned component replacement, and future Decent Homes requirements. A repair visit may expose a wider condition problem whose proper resolution belongs in another programme or budget.

The stronger data and compliance requirement creates more work before operatives reach site. Surveys, asset registers, risk prioritisation, programme design, resident communication, and evidence of completed work increasingly determine whether investment is targeted effectively and whether clients can demonstrate that legal and regulatory duties are being met.

Financial results for the first half reflect the cost of the mobilisation period. Revenue from continuing activities excluding divested facilities management work increased by 2% to £555.6m, while maintenance-led revenue rose 7%. Adjusted pre-tax profit fell by 10% to £28.9m as several new contracts moved through their start-up phase.

Mears expects those new relationships to contribute more fully once mobilisation matures. Its immediate construction risk is avoiding a loss of service quality while the enlarged order book converts from contract value into operational workload.

The group has just emerged from an intensive two-year period in which more than half of its maintenance contracts were subjected to re-procurement. Retentions at Cross Keys Homes, Livin, Moat Homes, Thurrock Council, and Leeds City Council contributed more than £1bn of new contract orders, reducing the volume of existing work due for near-term rebid.

That should release bidding and management capacity towards new opportunities, but it also means established clients have committed Mears to additional years of delivery in a market where compliance expectations and stock-investment requirements continue to rise.

The £4.2bn headline consequently represents a long-duration construction programme rather than a conventional project pipeline. Its delivery will take place across tens of thousands of occupied homes, through thousands of individual repairs and planned interventions, with success depending less on one major completion date than on whether local workforces, materials, data, and compliance processes perform consistently year after year.