The UK student accommodation market continued to flourish in 2018, with 31,348 new beds delivered for the 2018/19 academic year, according to new research from Cushman & Wakefield. This has taken the total number of purpose-built spaces available to a record 627,115 and a further 36,000 new rooms are expected to enter the market in 2019.
Cushman & Wakefield’s UK Student Accommodation Report 2018/19 looks at the market across the UK, including demand and supply of new developments.
New data reveals the private sector has grown 130% in four years and now controls over half of all supply in the market, if considering on-campus partnership bed spaces as ‘private sector’ beds. This is a significant change from 2014 when universities provided two thirds of all beds in the UK. New supply has also been dominated by private sector development with 77% of all beds delivered by this part of the market in 2018.
David Feeney, UK Student Accommodation Advisory at Cushman & Wakefield, commented: “The student accommodation market shows no sign of decelerating with another record-breaking year of student bed-space provision in 2018. Even with the uncertainty caused by Brexit we don’t expect the UK to become any less venerated as a top location for study and predict the upward trend to continue in 2019.
“Students are increasingly discerning when they select a university and the quality of amenity spaces is more important than ever to the success of schemes. With the private sector tendency towards individual rooms and amenity quality, there is a real opportunity for developers to meet increasing demand, in a market where students are not just weighing up the quality of their course, but the quality of facilities too.
“Over the coming year we will see more re-provisioning of bed spaces into high-grade communal spaces and an increasing number of private-university partnerships to achieve outstanding living spaces for students close to academic buildings.”
The Cushman & Wakefield Student Accommodation Tracker recorded 21,785 purpose-built student accommodation bed spaces in Birmingham for the 2018/19 academic year. New developments include premium accommodation by Hello Student starting at £159 per week, a new UNITE development in the city centre and an expansion of the Campus Living Villages accommodation on Bagot Street. The average price of an en-suite room in the city stands at £146 per week, and there has been a 20% increase in the number of en-suite bed spaces since 2015. Rental increases in en-suite rooms averaged 5.1% between 2017/18 and 2018/19.
The city continues to receive new planning applications, including a 280-bed student accommodation block on the corner of Dartmouth Middleway and Heneage Street, a six-story block for 61 students in Newtown and a large-scale 1,000-bed development in the Gun Quarter – a reflection of continued growth in response to a shortfall in student accommodation.
Average weekly rents were 7% higher for 2018/19 than in 2017/18, suggesting that the premium segment continues to grow. Sixty-eight percent (68%) of bed spaces are now en-suites, whilst the number of standard rooms has decreased by 15% since 2016. Around two thirds of student accommodation developments are run by private operators.