Housed: The Shared Living Podcast
Sarah Canning and Deenie Lee of The Property Marketing Strategists have teamed up with Daniel Smith of Student Housing Consultancy to discuss the latest news, views and insights in the shared living sector.
Each episode they will be delving into a wide variety of subjects and asking the questions which aren't often asked.
This podcast is a must for anyone working in Student Accommodation, BTR, Co-Living, Operational Real Estate or Shared Living.
Housed: The Shared Living Podcast
How The Budget may impact the sector, AI in shared living, do students see the value in uni and should marketplaces be charging booking fees?
After a short break, Sarah, Dan and Deenie are back with episode 9 of series 2 of Housed: The Shared Living Podcast. Here's what this latest episode covers:
ICEF Berlin - Dan's takeaways from the event and what feedback he had from his live demo session of the new AI solution for student accommodation operators.
Why Student Housing Consultancy is now called RESI Consultancy Limited - Dan explains the change of name for his business and what's to come in the future.
The Labour Government Budget - what were the impacts for the property industry? And our thoughts on the increase in tuition fees and maintenance loans.
The confirmed rumours about marketplaces charging booking fees - how is this being perceived by operators? And why it is illegal.
Scams in student accommodation - why we should be protecting vulnerable students and not taking advantage of them.
Should we talking more about cities like Nottingham where universities and the local authorities are co-ordinating and working together to get everything in the right place and giving a great example to the industry?
This episode of Housed is sponsored by Mystudenthalls.com - Search student accommodation across the UK
www.mystudenthalls.com
Hello and welcome to the ninth episode of season two of House, the shared living podcast. I'm Deanie Lee from the Property Marketing Strategists.
SPEAKER_00:I'm Dan Smith from Resi Consultancy, the artist formerly known as Student Housing Consultancy.
SPEAKER_01:And I'm Sarah Canning from the Property Marketing Strategists. And let's hear a little bit from our sponsor, My Student Halls, before we get on with the show. housed the shared living podcast is sponsored by mystudenthalls.com student accommodation search let's find your place Once again, a big thank you to My Student Halls for supporting us. We couldn't run this podcast without you, so thank you. We know that research is a key part of the booking journey for students when they're looking for accommodation. So being listed on sites like My Student Halls ensures that students are aware of your product and what it offers, but not just for the peak season. Accommodation research is done all year round, so do make sure that you are listed where you need to be and on My Student Halls and keep them updated and live. So now we're going to get on with the show. We took a short break last week because of half term and we have learnt that juggling work, childcare and podcasts does not mix. So sorry that if you missed us last week, but we are back this week with more news and insight. I'm not feeling particularly refreshed after half term, but I hope you guys are and welcome back. Dan, I think before we go to the show, you have a public service announcement
SPEAKER_00:to make. I do, a public health service announcement, I suppose. I think most people have probably seen the sad news about Sir Chris toy and the fact that he has terminal prostate cancer. I took this as an opportunity as a 43-year-old man to get my prostate checked. I went and had that done yesterday. They didn't use any rubber gloves. There were no fingers involved. It was a simple blood test. I would just encourage a lot of colleagues, peers, friends, people I've worked with, anyone in the industry, just go and get your prostate checked. Any men in the industry go and get your prostate checked.
SPEAKER_01:And I think from a female perspective as well I think we would like to echo that with Breast Cancer Awareness Month which was in October but you should be checking your breasts all times so I think you know for everyone in the sector hopefully if we encourage at least one person to get their bits checked then we'll have done our job.
SPEAKER_00:Agreed.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely agree so yes let's all go and check ourselves and let's all stay healthy and happy and moving up. sector forward. So thanks both for that. So what's been up this week, Dan? I believe you've just got back from Berlin.
SPEAKER_00:I have, yes. And it was ISEF. Now, ISEF have a big event in Berlin, bringing together universities, international education agents, student accommodation providers. And it was ISEF Digital on Saturday. Now, I was demoing the AI that I've been bagging on about for a little while now. And I will talk about this at some point more on another episode. I'm taking it out to operators at the moment. It's an omni-channel communications AI. so it will certainly help with streamlining sales and also help with operations too definitely reach out to me if you can shameless plug over and done with but icef is a brilliant event it always is because it's run by a brilliant team martine and josephine did a great job of firstly making all the speakers feel welcome it's very very professional but then The way that they integrate education agents, unis, providers, and accommodation operators is brilliant. So ISAF Digital, half the day was spent talking about AI, genuinely. And I think universities are a little bit further along than accommodation operators, in particular in the UK. Education agents are also starting to talk about it because they have a huge number of salespeople. And what AI is doing, it's able to do some of the manual grunt work and some of the overnight, for example, out-of-hours sales. sales work. And I think that's where it can be really, really useful to education agents in particular. But think about a university staffing up during peak season because they need more people in their accommodation department. That's where AI, again, can come in. So It was really interesting to see the technological advances, see how they're really being used. And I think, you know, there were a couple of people in the audience from the sector, Richard Powell from UniLife and Paul from Student Crowd. He was there as well doing a fireside chat. So lots of chat about how we can actually use technology to our advantage, not just AI, but, you know, the other areas of technology that people are starting to look at now to really take their business forward. So really good event. Would highly recommend any ISF event. I did stick around for the Monday. It was a bit of a smash and grab. I flew in on Friday, flew out Saturday night after I'd done a live demo to the audience of the AI solution that I'm putting forward. Yeah, really good fun.
SPEAKER_01:David Chatterton from Homes for Students, he tagged us all in a post on LinkedIn about kind of converting documents into AI podcasts, which completely blew my mind. And whenever I see these things, I always feel like, oh my God, I've got to get involved. And I'm quite resistant to change and technology as Dini will confirm. She dragged me kicking and screaming into this century. But sometimes I feel like with AI, it moves so quickly. You start adopting something and you've just got comfortable with it and the next thing has come along. And I find that really difficult and I'm not okay. I'm probably not the right age group to be, you know, being so agile and pragmatic with some of these things. But yeah, I feel like I definitely need a crash course in some of the ways that AI can help probably streamline our business. that also help, you know, support our clients. So yeah, I'm definitely interested in learning more.
SPEAKER_00:Oh boy, have I got a demo for you then, Sarah.
SPEAKER_01:And I think that's the thing with AI, it's the growth seems to be, an improvement seems to happen at lightning speed. It's kind of, you know, every second it just gets better and stronger, you know, and I don't know enough about it. And part of me scares me. I mean, I've seen humans and, you know, it can't all be good. Equally, it's getting that balance right of, you can make a massive difference and it can make things easy and stuff that actually I think from what you're saying Dan and what I'm understanding of kind of your demo and where AI is is that there's some things actually the sector's not doing because they don't have the resources to do it which AI can do it so it's not even about replacing stuff that people are doing badly it's just about doing stuff that actually you never get on your to-do list because there's so many other things to do so yeah it's definitely on my to-do list to go and learn a lot more about it although I do still slightly scare me
SPEAKER_00:slightly. I get that. And I think the thing with the solution that I'm putting forward is it is a game changer. It will change the way that operators operate, whether they're third party or vertically integrated. It will change the way that students interact with properties, property managers, brands. It's overarching and it will impact every element of operations, sales, marketing, and eventually finance, et cetera, as well. And it's a case of you get on board now, otherwise you will get left behind And there are multiple other solutions out there, but there are none that I've seen that really showcase the use cases in PBSA as well as the one that I'm putting forward. I'm being slightly cagey about the launch of it, actually, because I'm just... finalizing what my involvement looks like with the company and making sure that again i'm happy with taking it out to to to the relevant people but we've already closed quite a few operators already do reach out if you want to talk about it i will put it on my linkedin profile probably on friday so by the time you're listening to this you'll be able to go and see what it is and i'll start announcing what that looks like a little bit later on but yeah we'll come on to ai at some point in the future i'll probably have to sponsor that episode no doubt so yeah i Exciting times.
SPEAKER_01:And you had another big announcement as well last week, I think, a name change.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yes. Oh, my God. Yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah, so Student Housing Consultancy does what it says on the tin. It wasn't the most imaginative brand, but I like that, to be honest with you. I like to keep things relatively simple. But I'm very pigeonholed. And given that I've been asked to do quite a lot of work within the BTR sector, co-living, and I'm having to expand the team to cope with that, I have changed the name to Resi Consultancy. So we'll be resiconsultancy.com. That website is live. And then we have different verticals. So we've got btrconsultancy.com, colivingconsultancy.com, laterlivingconsultancy.com. All of those websites will come over time. But right now we're still, I mean, we're so swamped with student businesses at the moment, particularly with investors in struggling markets wanting a bit of oversight. That's still the focus. But yeah, it just felt like Resi Consultancy was going to be a nice overarching brand where I could launch into different verticals and still have the supposed credibility that I do within student housing and take that across to BTR and co-living. Because we are starting to see, as we've talked about, a bit of a blended living sector, the shared living sector, as we've always called it, between BTR co-living and student input. particular. So making sure that there's learnings that can be transferred across each of those sectors. It's not a case of beds of beds. So just do the same thing you're doing in PBSA and translate it to BTR or co-living. But I think there's enough there that we can make sure that we are treating each of the BTR or co-living operators and investors differently to how we would PBSA, but there's common themes that are underlying it all. So yeah, really excited to push that out there, get that launched and hopefully watch that grow over time.
SPEAKER_01:That's great. And that's probably why we called it the Shared Living Podcast, because there is a lot of similarities and blended living on the up. There has been lots of big news in the last week, I think. Firstly, we had a budget from the new Labour government, the first budget for 14 years from Labour. By all intense purposes, it was a big budget, a big tax raising budget, it. What are the impacts on the sector? I think there's clear ambitions from the Labour government to provide a solution to the housing crisis. So there was a lot in the budget about supporting new home growth, building safety. Thank goodness that that featured quite highly. And, you know, more about kind of local growth, devolution, et cetera, et cetera. So I think as we're looking at the sector as a whole, there's certainly green shoots. There's certainly positive things to look for. I guess on a micro level, we still kind of question, are the right houses being built for the right people in the right places at the right budget? And obviously, you know, policy and housing budget probably never go as far as to kind of dictate that. So I think that's just something to bear in mind. And, you know, quite rightly, if the focus can be on the affordable with a capital A at the bottom of the market, then everything else should flow up from that. So that was really positive. And when we were writing the notes for this, there was nothing about universities, nothing about students was there and then suddenly i think it was monday wasn't it arrived and we had to rewrite our notes for the podcast so what what were your guys kind of i guess takeaways for higher education that will therefore impact student accommodation and renters thereafter
SPEAKER_00:no drastic impacts to be completely honest in terms of the tuition fee rise that we've just seen coming through 250 quid is not even going to scratch the surface and there's a lot of sensationalist headlines saying oh how are these students going to afford an extra 250 quid a year, it's£250 against the backdrop of previously£9,250. So I think we've got to be realistic here. That is a drop in the ocean. They could have really opened the floodgates there and pushed it up by a couple of thousand pounds because I think with a better student loans payback term, I just think that that would certainly help and it would mitigate any fallout from raising that quite so much. But to do£250 as an increase onto tuition fees is a pittance and it won't make any difference to universities. There will be still plenty of universities that start to struggle. You'll see a lot of redundancies. We're already seeing that now. Just literally search university redundancies in Google News and you'll see that universities, shock horror, they're still struggling. International student numbers are not looking like they are going to recover anytime soon. That's not me being a prophet of doom at all. It's just everything that I'm hearing from marketplaces and universities and and the trends that we're seeing so far. I don't think the tuition fees increase of£250 is going to help one iota. So yeah, there was a real opportunity there to do something reasonably drastic and support the sector. The only other way that I can think what they're planning is potentially letting a university or two go to the wall, and then they will have to step in and say, right, the government needs to fund universities in some way, shape or form. But again, that's going to be extremely unpopular and extremely expensive. So ultimately, I don't see any other opportunity but for a full review into the higher ed sector, which has been proposed and I think will gain traction. And I'm not saying our higher education sector is broke, but it is financially unsustainable. So the next step is to do a full review and start to think about how to effectively fund it and make it equitable and fair. So yeah, we'll watch this space, but no major changes as far as I can see right now. Just a few sensationalist headlines, frustrated students and poor universities.
SPEAKER_01:I agree. It felt very much like a nod by the Labour government to say, yep, we know that needs to be looked at. We know there's a problem that£250 and the small increase in maintenance loans is not going to make any fundamental difference to anyone, but just acknowledgement of that there's issues that they need to solve. And like you say, Dan, I think it was good to hear that actually overall reform and review is on the agenda because ultimately that's what it needs. So we will watch this space. It will be interesting to see how universities are respond kind of with their internal structures, but it's a drop in the ocean of actually what needs to be done. I think what it's done is shone a light on people that kind of maybe hadn't really thought about the tuition fees or maintenance loans. And suddenly it got all the headlines on Monday. And that's not necessarily a good thing because I think the word value kept coming out a lot from the students that were being interviewed. And I don't think that anyone would argue with£250 increase over such a long period of time if people were feeling like they were getting value from their university experience. It's not very much. It doesn't even touch the surface of what it would have been if it had been linked to inflation 12 years ago. So I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is that it's another cost when students are maybe not feeling the value. So I think it is an opportunity, I think, for universities to look at their offering. to make sure that the courses, that the res life experience, that the accommodation experience, that it all feels equitable. It all feels like it's contributing to something that will provide amazing graduate outcomes at the end of it. We know that universities pivoted to online learning during COVID and many of them are still offering hybrid. That doesn't seem to be supporting students in the way that face-to-face learning was. So that's one area that they might not be seeing value in their degree as well. So I think it's connected to accommodation and shared living because the less students that go to university, the less people there are to fill all of the beds and therefore the less, you know, potential graduates, the less contribution to the economy in those areas. So it's got a massive, massive knock on effect. However much you're paying, it has to feel like it's worth it. And, you know, every penny kind of in a cost of living situation in a struggling sector, I think will potentially provide a kind of a bit of a challenging year. I've seen some kind of polls from students and most of them are saying it doesn't affect them. They're not going to not go to university. because of an extra£250. But how are they going to feel when they get there? Are they going to be more demanding customers? Are they going to expect a huge deal because they're paying such a lot of money every year to be there?
UNKNOWN:Probably.
SPEAKER_00:They're already pretty demanding as it is. Every operator that I speak to is talking about how demanding students now are. Same with the universities as well. And they are seeking out that value. So where are they getting that? It's from those universities with good graduate outcomes. And it's not something we've got enough data on. That's for sure. It just feels like the government have done as little as possible to say, look, hang on a minute, we are going to review, we're going to have a look at what's going on with the whole sector as it is, you know, be ready for that. But in the meantime, get your houses in order. You have to really run lean so that I think they'll be okay with these redundancies because there's a lot of universities carrying a lot of weight that they should probably shed. And there are some hefty pension deficits and still some hefty pension bonuses being put through as well. I still think we need to look at much more commercial leadership within universities. That's not me saying we shouldn't have any academics, but when you've got universities an academic who's gone through as a lecturer to a head of faculty or department to then run a billion pound business, that for me feels like there's probably going to be some private sector or commercial nous that will be missing along the way. And again, that's not to say that all of the answers to our prayers within higher education lie in the private sector. I think there's a lot of academics out there and VCs out there who have been life academics who do an incredible job. But it's no surprise that the top university in the country, in Imperial, has a VC who is from the private sector and isn't a life academic. And therefore there is a much more of a focus on commerciality of that university. It doesn't mean that the university is a sellout because look at where it is in the rankings. I just think that universities are being given almost last chance saloon here by the government to say, look, we will be having a look at this. We'll review the whole sector. We'll give you 250 quid for now, but we know that's not enough. We know that it should be 12 and a half, 13,000 pounds theoretically. So get your houses in order We will come and look at this. And in the meantime, let's hope that no one goes to the wall. And if they do, then what will the government do? Probably just enforce a merger with another university across that city if that's feasible, or some kind of bailout by the back door that doesn't necessarily attract huge headlines or start a precedent for loads of other universities. But it may be that the sector has to go into full crisis mode for the government to actually act in a viable way to make the sector sustainable moving forward.
SPEAKER_01:Well, watch this space. I'm sure it's a... We'll come back to time and time again, but we'll see what happens next. We're not over our politics segment yet, but we're now going to go over the pond because we've all woken up this morning to a new Trump presidency. How are we feeling?
SPEAKER_00:We shouldn't be shocked by this anymore. And I don't feel shocked. I remember when Brexit happened, I was pretty gutted. In fact, I'd say I was distraught, partly because I was negotiating my salary that day, walking into the roundtable office, but partly because I'm a Europhile at heart and Brexit is the single most catastrophic thing that could have happened in the last 25 years, realistically. And it was a huge act of self-sabotage. Brexit aside, though, Trump's only got four years. So there's only so much damage that he can do in four years other than, you know, put his finger on the big red button. I think that it's not actually altogether that shocking. We've seen it before. Nothing major happened apart from the fact that there was the Trump effect in international education. You know, US universities instantly shed 10% of their international students and it continued to decline in the years after that. So that was in the first year, 10% decline in international students. That is the Trump effect. And that will, I would expect, happen again. So, you know, what can we expect as the UK? Hopefully a little bit of a boost in numbers because Canada and Australia seem to be pretty hostile to international students at the moment as well. Europe may pick up a few, but not if they're going to focus on, you know, native language courses rather than English language courses. So realistically, are we going to see a big boost? I would hope a little one at least. So marginal gains rather than a big sweeping change and a load of students coming over here because I was speaking to an investor this morning and she was saying that she thinks that actually what's going to happen is that the Chinese will probably still stay closer to home. So they'll go to Singapore, they'll go to Hong Kong, they'll study in China rather than going from the US to the UK. So yeah, don't expect a huge bump, but hope Hopefully there will be some positive effect from the Trump effect over here.
SPEAKER_01:A silver lining. That sounds good.
SPEAKER_00:Fingers crossed.
SPEAKER_01:On to the next subject. I think enough of politics for today. But marketplaces, Dan. There's been a rumour around some marketplaces charging some booking fees. So I'd be interested to have a quick chat about that.
SPEAKER_00:Brace yourselves. It's not a rumour. It's confirmed. I have the screenshots and... I don't like it. I really don't like it at the moment. And actually, there are some serious questions around whether that is illegal now. I put it out there on LinkedIn on Tuesday morning, and the feedback has been pretty unanimous from the operators. They don't like it. I've had six different operators now. I can see in my messages, my WhatsApps, and a couple of missed calls as well, because they all feel the same, but they don't kind of mobilize together to talk about the fact that they hate these booking fees quite so much. There's a few of them that will obviously have a chat at some of the events about that kind of thing. But yeah, I think this is becoming more and more of a problem for the marketplaces in particular, but primarily for the operators. And so the issue that you have is that student accommodation marketplaces, some of them are charging booking fees. Now, I've seen these booking fees at£50. I think most of them are actually about£100, but I've also seen them at£300 before. And that was probably about three months ago that I saw a£300 booking fee. Now, it seems like these marketplaces, and it's the big ones as well, we're not just talking there's a spurious marketplace coming out of Mumbai or Delhi or Beijing or wherever. This is the big marketplaces that are doing this. And I think they're doing it because the operators have said to them, you cannot list that property for sale because you do not earn commission on it. Or if you are listing that property for sale, we will not pay you any commission on it because they just don't need to. Somewhere, although those places are few and far between now, but if there's somewhere that fills up relatively easily, you don't necessarily need a marketplace to help you. You turn off that commission. I'm not saying that that's the right thing to do. I think there's a a balance to be sustainable with your marketplace relationships too. But ultimately, the marketplaces are then taking matters into their own hands to say, well, we're not getting commission from the operator on this, so why don't we charge the student a fee? And that is happening more and more. In my opinion, that should stop. And for the dramatic pause there, you may have noticed, I just think that should be written into contracts where you are making sure that marketplaces understand are not doing that because one good reason, by the looks of it, from what I can see, that is illegal. It breaches the Tenant Fees Acts of 2019. Feel free to have a look at my LinkedIn post from Tuesday morning. And operators are corroborating this, as is someone from a law firm that has just got in touch with me too, that it breaches it because the marketplace is acting as an agent of the landlord or the operator. And therefore, they are involved in that tenancy process. Now, I do think this is also because some marketplaces are not getting paid commission on domestic student bookings too. Primarily those kind of global marketplaces that were a lot actually founded out of India and then have broadened their horizons to focus on domestic UK students. They don't get commissions on those all of the time. Sometimes they do. Where they're not, they are putting booking fees on and charging the student. I just don't like it. I don't like it as a practice. And that might make me unpopular with the marketplaces. But if I was working in a marketplace, as I have done several times, I would say that has to stop. And so I do think that we need to make sure that marketplaces are working with operators rather than against them. When I'm getting messages from some big and some small operators this morning saying, we really don't like this. Like we've had bad feedback from our students saying they didn't realize they were getting charged and they thought it was all included or they thought it was the operator charging them. Just the confusion around it. That is a real problem. And I think that some of these marketplaces are saying, yeah, but we've also booked your flights or we've helped you with your university application. This is a service fee for our platform. Again, I'm not sure about that. I think if it's part of the tenancy, if you're helping someone to book through a tenancy agreement, then that is effectively going to come under the Tenant Fees Act of 2019. That's very much me on my soapbox there telling you my opinion of it. I'm not saying that that is right or wrong because I do always see marketplaces sides of it, but the marketplace sector has to add value. You cannot have these tension points where they're constantly rubbing operators up the wrong way. Equally, the operators need to make sure that they're working hand in glove with the marketplaces so that the marketplaces don't have to feel like they should, to hit their revenue targets, they have to go behind the operators back to charge the student money. But equally, that points to a problem within the operator from my side of things. So that's my 10 pence worth. Sarah Deeney, what are your thoughts?
SPEAKER_01:I think my first question thought to that is this could be really, really problematic to the reputation of operators because a lot of these students won't understand that they're not being charged by the operator, that they're being charged by the marketplace. And I'm sure that's probably some of the stories that are coming out, Dan, and how this came to light is there's probably students that are turning up at reception saying, what's this fee? What's this charge? And they won't understand that it's nothing to do with the operators. So to your point, it definitely needs to go in the contract that they shouldn't be doing it. And if there's no commission charge, then they shouldn't be advertising it. end off I literally have just written an article for student pages about scams in student accommodation and my first tip is nobody should be charging you a fee you know walk the other way if you're being charged a fee because it's illegal you know and that's very much the message certainly to domestic students or students in this country looking for accommodation so it's terrible to think that students from overseas who are vulnerable who have a lack of you know understanding of the way things work here are being taken advantage of, quite frankly. I think if the fee isn't for that, then you've got to be really transparent about what that fee's for. And I think it comes down to any marketing, any product, any services, you've got to be completely transparent, clear about what your charges are and what that upfront is going to look like. So it all sounds quite murky, I guess, for want of a better word to me. And, you know, our first advice on anything is like, if you're going to do something, be clear, be transparent, make the customer comfortable that they know what they're doing, what they're getting into, what they're doing. So it all sounds like something's gone awry.
SPEAKER_00:That's very murky. You're right, Deanie. And what I'm finding really interesting is is that there are some marketplaces pivoting their models at the moment. And I think that does show that there's a certain element of the entire marketplace industry that is a little bit broken. Now, that's me saying that off the back of what looks like an incredible conference by uHomes. And they, according to everybody that I spoke to about that, they put on an amazing show and give a fair bit of data. I do see that there's value in a lot of the marketplaces and what they do but we are at that point where operators are seriously considering do i forego thousands of bookings potentially because this marketplace is working against me they are competing and that that is what has to stop it has to be that a marketplace work with operators yes you can play them off against each other to make sure that you get them you know competing for rankings and and whatever else it might be but but i think that When you see the likes of, I know student.com have just pivoted. Housemates have also pivoted to working B2B rather than B2C. Student.com have pivoted. They've got a listings model now by the looks of it, as well as potentially a commission-based model. Not 100% sure. I will have to catch up with the team there. But there's a few others as well that are certainly considering that. And this move towards charging a booking fee, it's coming from some of these bigger marketplaces, as well as some of the smaller ones. And that, I think, is where the marketplace industry has just gone awry in some respects. So the more that we can bring them back into the fold and say, guys, work with us as operators. We want to see you thrive. Obviously, we want to pay you a fair price. We don't want to see the commission rates at 22% every year in wherever it might be. But I think that there just needs to be a bit of a reset. You could all do that through your contracting. So as you contract for this coming year, you can all do that and make sure that you have those terms in there that say, we won't turn the taps off for the marketplaces. We may adjust the commission, potentially. But we do not want you charging a booking fee. We do not want you bidding on any of our keywords or key search terms that are linked to our brand or property. And if you so wish, we don't want any domestic students. Now, I'm not saying that that's a policy that I would take, but I do think that there are some operators who are rightly questioning whether they need to take domestic students from marketplaces. And again, this talks to the evolution of marketplaces. They're all born out of a Thailand, Southeast Asia, anywhere. They start there. They bring those students from those source locations over to the UK or Australia or US. And then they start to think, hang on, how can we grow? How can we expand? We can look at the local domestic market in that country. And that's what's happened. It's seen as low hanging fruit that you just stick an ad on Google, get them to your website. If your sales funnel of your website is good enough, they'll book through you rather than direct through the operator. And that, again, is where operators feel like their toes are being trodden on. And I think there needs to be a real hard look at how you're contracting marketplaces. It's something we're doing with our clients really very carefully because we want to make sure that we bring the marketplaces along on that journey. We allow them to expand or at least have a sustainable business But that doesn't help when some of these marketplaces are beholden to unrealistic valuations, investor expectations, or potentially ego-driven founders who just want to see growth at all costs. And that is it. And I'm not making reference to any one particular founder there at all, because they're all completely different. But I think that we just need to be mindful of the power that marketplaces now have and the fact that if left unchecked, buy operators, they are going to take a mile. That's just the nature of business. That's effectively the nature of any kind of corporation and the nature of capitalism, realistically. They're going to try and make as much money as they can. So contract them carefully, work with them closely, and build that relationship to make it sustainable. Find out what they need, but don't just let them Take, take, take.
SPEAKER_01:I think that's probably a wrap for this episode. We've come from public announcements, so go make sure you check yourself. And I think we've talked about collaboration a lot. So they're our key words, check yourself and collaborate this week. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you once again to our sponsor, My Student Halls. We really appreciate your support so we can bring our news and insight to your ears every week. We'll be back next week for more news and insights, so please subscribe and share.