For many years, bankruptcy forecasting has been in the sphere of interests of a wide group of stakeholders: regulators, investors, creditors, rating agencies, auditors, consultants and company management. In this regard, development of new and improvement of existing models for assessing the risk of companies’ insolvency remain an urgent research issue. The goal of the study is to identify the factors contributing to the bankruptcy of companies in the construction industry and the development of approaches to risk assessment of their insolvency. The choice of the industry is explained by the growing number of financial distressed companies and bankruptcies in this sector of economy in recent years and the profound social consequences of bankruptcies: the loss of savings of the broad strata of the population (participants in shared-equity construction) and the inability for them to improve housing conditions for a long time, the job losses for a significant number of workers employed in this labor-intensive industry. To achieve the goal of the study, the authors have made a forecast of the probability of Russian companies’ bankruptcy in the construction industry and conclusions about the level of reliability of the results obtained on the basis of traditional fundamental models. The conducted study and the obtained results may serve as a strong argument for the necessity to develop new approaches and models for bankruptcy forecasting, for the importance of taking into account the country and industry specifics. The article makes a significant step in this direction: the approaches to identifying signs of financial distress and the probability of bankruptcy are clarified, key control points critical for predicting the probability of bankruptcy in construction industry and directions of their prevention are identified.