Glenigan
Glenigan is a Bournemouth-based construction data and news service that tracks United Kingdom building projects from their earliest planning stages through tendering, contract award and completion, and publishes the market intelligence, forecasting and company information that the built-environment sector uses to find work and read the market. Established in 1973, the company describes itself as the trusted provider of UK construction project sales leads, market analysis, forecasting and company intelligence, and its headquarters are at 80 Holdenhurst Road in Bournemouth, Dorset. In a directory of news agencies, Glenigan belongs to the category of specialist information services whose reporting is itself a form of journalism: its researchers gather facts project by project, its economists turn those facts into indices and forecasts, and its findings are regularly reported by construction trade media and cited across the wider business press.
Origins in Dorset in 1973
Glenigan began in 1973 as a local planning and contract awards service in Dorset. That modest starting point matters, because the method it pioneered locally — reading planning applications, following contract awards and telephoning the people involved to fill in the detail — is recognisably the method the company still uses at national scale. Over the following decades the service grew in size and scope, merging with other operations and expanding its research team into what industry guides describe as the largest in its field. The Bournemouth base was retained throughout: when the company redesigned its headquarters with Axis House, it chose to stay in the town, downsizing from around 8,000 square feet to a 4,000-square-foot office designed for hybrid working. A service founded on Dorset planning lists had become, without leaving the south coast, one of the two big construction sales-leads providers in Britain, the other being Barbour ABI — a rivalry that structures much of the UK construction intelligence market.
How the research machine works
The scale of Glenigan's data gathering is the foundation of everything else it publishes. Industry overviews of the service describe sophisticated software collating and sorting around half a million planning applications a year. Smaller projects, judged to be worth £100,000 or less, are logged in the database, while a team of more than 100 dedicated researchers works on the larger schemes, making around a million phone calls a year between them to establish the companies, decision-makers and contact details behind each project. Researched projects are then tracked through the planning process and on to tendering, contract award and even subcontract awards, so a subscriber can follow a scheme from a first planning submission to the appointment of the firms that will actually build it. That combination — comprehensive data gathering, exhaustive human research, detailed statistical modelling and expert analysis, in the company's own summary — is what distinguishes a researched intelligence service from a simple cuttings or listings operation.
Products: leads, data and company intelligence
Paying users access the project database through a web portal that lets them identify schemes of interest with the information needed to pursue them, with updates available in real time and a mobile app for following projects on the move. The historical depth of the data allows it to be mined in many ways: tracing regional trends, conducting market research or analysing competitors. Advanced tools include mapping software and integrated email marketing, and larger firms can take the data through a sales-leads API and incorporate it into their own systems. Alongside project leads, Glenigan supplies company intelligence on the firms active across the construction cycle, so users can assess the businesses they might work with, compete against or supply. Its stated client base spans companies of all sizes at every stage of the construction cycle, from designers and main contractors to suppliers of materials and services to the industry.
The Glenigan Index and construction forecasting
Beyond the subscription database, Glenigan is a publisher of economic intelligence about construction, and this is where it functions most visibly as a news agency. Its regular Construction Index reports project-starts data in detail — seasonally adjusted, focused on underlying projects of £100 million or less, and broken down by sector and region — and its construction industry forecasts look several years ahead. The October 2026 edition of the Index, covering the three months to the end of September 2026, illustrates the genre: overall starts edged down 2 per cent on the preceding three months and stood 18 per cent below the previous year, non-residential starts fell, private housing stabilised, and a surge in civil engineering — with civils starts reported rocketing in the previous quarter on the back of grid, transport and utilities investment — partially offset the decline. Glenigan's economics director, Allan Wilen, is the public voice of these releases, commenting on what the numbers mean for housebuilding, commercial development and infrastructure. Forecasts published by the company extend the same analysis forward, projecting project starts by sector — in its 2026–2028 forecast, for example, hotel and leisure starts were projected to decline in 2026 after two years of growth before returning to growth the following year.
Official and industry roles
Glenigan's standing rests partly on roles that go beyond selling subscriptions. The company produces the construction industry's Key Performance Indicators survey for the Office for National Statistics and the government's business department, and it lists strategic partnerships with bodies including The Builders' Conference, BRE, the UK Contractors Group, Constructing Excellence, the Civil Engineering Contractors Association, the Home Builders Federation and GroundSure. In 2021 it acquired CIS, described as Ireland's leading provider of business intelligence to the Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland construction industry, extending its coverage across the Irish Sea and into its UK and Ireland forecasting. A "4C Service" label on its recruitment material also signals its place within a wider corporate group structure serving the built environment. These entanglements with official statistics and industry institutions mean Glenigan's numbers are not merely one vendor's estimates; they feed the benchmarks by which the sector measures itself.
Who uses Glenigan, and why
The practical audience divides into three overlapping groups. The first is business-development teams at contractors, subcontractors, consultants and product manufacturers, who use project leads to fill pipelines — finding schemes at the stage when specifications and appointments are still open. The second is strategic: directors and analysts using the market intelligence, regional data and forecasts to decide where to invest, which sectors to target and how competitors are positioned. The third is the wider world of media, government and finance, which consumes Glenigan's published indices as news. When trade titles report that construction starts have fallen or that infrastructure is keeping the industry moving through a sluggish spell, the figures and the quoted commentary very often come from Glenigan's releases, making the company an originator of a significant share of the UK's construction economic news.
Competition and market position
Glenigan operates in a competitive intelligence market in which Barbour ABI is the other major UK project-leads provider, and comparison between the two is a staple of construction sales and marketing advice. Both track planning and project data nationally; differentiation rests on research depth, sector coverage, forecasting credibility and the usability of their platforms. Glenigan's claims to leadership rest on the size of its research team, the volume of planning applications it processes, its official KPI work and the media profile of its index. For an industry in which a single contract can transform a regional business, the value of early, accurate, contact-level information is high, which sustains a market for researched intelligence well beyond what free planning portals provide.
Why Glenigan matters as a news source
Construction is one of the UK economy's most watched sectors — a bellwether for investment confidence, housing supply and infrastructure delivery — yet it is fragmented across thousands of local projects that no general newsroom could track unaided. Glenigan fills that gap by industrialising the tracking: hundreds of thousands of planning applications sorted, hundreds of thousands of verification calls made, and the results aggregated into a narrative about where Britain is building and where it has stopped. Its forecasts are quoted when governments announce housebuilding programmes and when budgets are judged against delivery. That is the essence of an agency function: gathering facts at a scale individual outlets cannot match and supplying them, as data, as leads and as ready-made economic news, to an entire industry and to the media that report on it.
