Housed: The Shared Living Podcast

The Dangerous Data Driving Student Housing, PBSA Headwinds, Immigration Mixed Messages, Hypermixity and Youth Mobilility

• Season 4 • Episode 5

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We are on Episode 61 and this week the hosts, Deenie, Sarah and Dan are discussing some of the content and themes from the recent Student Housing Conference by LD Events.

The episode covers;
- Is agent data dangerous?
- PBSA headwinds
- Immigration mixed messages
- The complexities around hypermixity and where are real opportunities for growth?
- Immigration white paper
- Government's suspected plans for Youth Mobility as part of its UK/EU Summit 

Thank you to our season four sponsors:
MyStudentHalls - Find your ideal student accommodation across the UK.
Utopi - The smart building platform helping real estate owners protect the value of their assets.
Washstation - Leading provider of laundry solutions for Communal and Campus living throughout the UK and Ireland. 

Each week, Sarah Canning, Deenie Lee of The Property Marketing Strategists and Daniel Smith of RESI Consultancy will be delving into a wide variety of subjects and asking the questions that aren't often asked. This podcast is for anyone who works in Student Accommodation, BTR, Co-living, Later Living, university accommodation, Operational Real Estate or Shared Living.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are the personal views of the individual hosts and guests.


Speaker 1:

Hello everyone and welcome back to Housed, the shared living podcast. We're on episode five, already in season four, and we're very grateful that you've been listening in your hundreds to this brand new season. I'm Dan Smith from Resi Consultancy.

Speaker 3:

I'm Deanie Lee from the Property.

Speaker 2:

Marketing Strategists and I'm Sarah Canning from the Property Marketing Strategists.

Speaker 1:

And now a quick word from our headline sponsor.

Speaker 3:

Season four of Housed is sponsored by mystudenthallscom. List your properties commission-free and reach thousands of students searching for their university home.

Speaker 1:

Thanks very much to Dan and the team from my Student Halls. They've been supporters of Housed since the start. We're very grateful they're here once again as headline sponsors of season four. It is well worth getting in touch with them to list your student accommodation on their platform. It's really easy for students to find and book and they are incredibly prevalent across all of the key search engines. So well worth listing with my student halls if you haven't already. Make sure that you are listed. Also, a huge thank you to our brand new sponsors, wash station and utopia.

Speaker 1:

You'll hear a bit more from them later on, so we are going to talk quite fast because we're off to UK Reef this week. I am zooming off in a second, but we're recording this on the Monday before our busy week starts. So we'll bring you all the insights from Leeds in our next episode in a couple of weeks time. But we have had a very busy week. Last week In particular, it was the LD event, student housing conference, which I've been to year after year, and, sarah, obviously you were there this year as well. What were your thoughts?

Speaker 2:

I was actually really pleasantly surprised at the content. If I'm honest, I think I've been kind of many times before and sometimes it feels like the content is quite repetitive, and sometimes it has to be because you know it's about the market updates etc. Etc. But actually I wrote loads and loads of notes. You know, I found the insight interesting. It would be nice if we could not continue to discuss certain things, bring in some new topics, but I understand that it's a packed agenda and there's so you know, so many hours, so much time that they can. They can cover things. Really. I mean, it was a bit bad timing, not not for LD events, but because the immigration white paper was announced the day before LD. We're going to come on to that. But obviously it meant that during the content there was quite a lot of caveats because the poor panelists and the poor presenters had to kind of rapidly rewrite all their notes, I think in light of what may change because of the immigration white paper. But regardless of that, I felt that Bernadette from Unite's insight about international students was really valuable. It kind of was much more about about them as students and kind of all of the things, all of the hoops that they have to jump through to get him in the first place and kind of a real kind of eye-opener about cultural and identity that I think should be shared far and wide beyond the people that were at the conference as well. So that was a highlight for me. Obviously, richard Ward from Stu Rents and his data, which it's great to see it in writing. But I think we'll all agree it's a lot of the topics that we cover, you know, week in, week out on house. You know, particularly around affordability. The other thing that I was really pleased that Richard brought into it was about contract lengths and this is something that you know, we know is bubbling and it was actually really great that he called it out. It was like we have noticed that you know that you might be keeping your rent stable but your weeks are, you know, are increasing. So great to call that out as well. I loved Nick Riley's presentation from an architect's point of view about what if you didn't separate tenant types Dina, you would have loved that, because I know that's something that you're really passionate about and types Dina, you would have loved that, because I know that's something that you're really passionate about.

Speaker 2:

That conversation carried on into the pub afterwards with a lot about logistics. Like, well, how would you do it if you had a block for co-living, a block for build to rent, a block for later living and a block for PBSA? But they all shared the communal space, they all shared one entrance and they all shared kind of one set of staff. Like there would be loads of room for engagement, for connection, for community. That would be amazing.

Speaker 2:

The conversations in the pub afterwards was but what about pricing? Because you would have to create some kind of tiered pricing because, as we know, there would be nothing to stop the students going to live in the BTR block or the co-living block unless there was a real reason for them to live in the BTR block or the co-living block, unless there was a real reason for them to live in the PBSA block. So you'd have to start thinking quite long and hard about tenancy rates and also contract lengths as well. It doesn't work the other way around, because the non-students couldn't live in the PBSA building. But you know, you've got to think about how it would flow the other way.

Speaker 3:

I guess. But that's still segmentation by a different form. So can't we just build a building and put people in it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean he suggested different ways of doing that. I guess it's because that you would connect with different people at certain times but maybe you wouldn't in other times, and maybe that's because older people might want to not live next door to students you know they might have different hours, you know and there might be, you know again, young people that are studying that might not want to be around families that might live in build to rent. So I don't think we should dismiss it completely, but it's not quite as clear cut and as pretty as his kind of his pictures would suggest.

Speaker 1:

I would agree with that. He, he's brilliant. I see him at a lot of the conferences. There's a reason he's always on stage, really really good.

Speaker 1:

But yeah, I think we're in danger of kind of forcing that agenda a little bit. And actually we're tribal by nature. Humans are tribal and you want to be with people who you have things in common with, because you want to be in your comfort zone typically. And I think that when it comes to where you live, that is very apparent and I think it would. You know, if you have someone in later living living next door to an undergrad student who is doing a bit of a spurious course and quite happy to go out to all hours, you just better hope that you know their hearing isn't great. And I think that's where we've got a bit of a problem with trying to sort of shoehorn residents next to each other and see how it goes. Now we know that hyber and birch grove have have had a bit of a pilot ongoing. We will catch up with hannah, hopefully from from hyber in uk reef in leeds to see how that's going, or maybe on a barrel be there from from birch grove. But yeah, I think we're in danger of kind of shoehorning, that it is a really tricky balance to get right and it just has to be done really carefully and thoughtfully, rather than just everybody sort of moves into a, moves into a building on ld I. Yeah, I really like this event.

Speaker 1:

I was on a panel talking about prop tech and and I didn't feel like it was sponsors being shoehorned in. You can sort of start to feel that at some of these events. But yeah, I was on a panel with operators and investors talking about how PropTech and AI is changing things. I was obviously there on behalf of Vervaflow, so we've got three minutes just to kind of do a little bit of a gentle pitch, shall we say. I thought about doing a, a demo of verbaflow, but then I was like it's got to just be a little bit more neutral than that. So so, yeah, in enjoyed that side of things, but it was too short. So I think the panel sessions need to be increased.

Speaker 1:

I'd go from half an hour to an hour for each of the panel sessions and and then probably some of the presentations, I'd shorten them a bit, especially the agent presentations, because what we saw was borderline misleading and it's the same graphs that we're seeing year after year, same charts. One of the charts that we saw was relying on data from 2022, academic year 2022, the HESA data there, talking about the shortfall of student accommodation in cities across the UK, pleased to say that Sheffield and Coventry didn't show a shortfall there, but it completely ignored BTR, student HMOs, commuter students and it took the university halls and the PBSA and then matched against the total student number. That is barking mad and, I'll be honest, people were laughing at it and we saw it from one agent in particular and they reel this out year after year, this same chart. I'm not even sure they changed it and people were literally shaking their heads looking at it on stage and we're just so in danger of some of these research bodies that are linked to the agents just peddling what salespeople at these agents want them to say, and I overheard them saying I hear Dan Smith's bearish about the, about the PBSA market, and so I turned around and introduced myself to them and just said look, I wouldn't say I am bearish about the whole market, but we have a lot of headwinds and you have to look at this on a regional basis and what we're seeing is agents, shock, horror, telling people to buy and build pretty much everywhere is agents shock, horror, telling people to buy and build pretty much everywhere, and I mean at the right rents and with the right facilities and in the right location.

Speaker 1:

Yes, you could buy or build anywhere, but we're so hamstrung, we're building so many studios still it is completely prohibitive. So I, yeah, I really struggled with the agent presentations. I made my made myself pretty clear on a LinkedIn post the following day, which was clearly quite a hot topic given the profile views that I was getting from a lot of PBSA agents on LinkedIn. But, yeah, just really frustrating. Everybody in the pub afterwards was talking about it and saying we can't keep seeing these same charts from the agents. What do we do here to kind of show them the reality of the situation? Because every single operator in that room was saying, well, that's not the picture for me and I definitely wouldn't buy and build there. When you look at some of the graphs, yeah, it was quite shocking and quite jarring and I think everyone's done with it. We're so done with it, sarah. What? What were your thoughts on it?

Speaker 2:

yeah, and I completely agree. And, and the conversations afterwards, nobody bought into it. No, nobody that was there believed what they were seeing in the grass. So it just it came across as lazy. You know words that were being used were irresponsible, misleading, potentially damaging. You know, because if you've got a naive investor, maybe somebody who's not familiar with the uk market, who sees those graphs, you know they're going to crack on building. You know in the wrong places and that's not going to support you know, support the sector at all.

Speaker 1:

I agree. It's really frustrating to see, it's dangerous in my opinion, and we should just say like this is this is our opinion here, but it was corroborated by the vast majority of operators and investors there. And I think that that's where the likes of bernadette really kind of talking and explaining what's happening from a market perspective on an international level. That was brilliant and I'd expect that from bernadette. To be fair, she's, she's fantastic. Then richard ward, just adding that dose of reality.

Speaker 1:

We know that Stu Rents have come out recently and said hey, look, in our last data everyone's 9% behind on a like-for-like basis with their sales velocity.

Speaker 1:

There's been a bit of a pickup, from what I can see from certain operators and clients, but we are still clearly behind. And I think people are like, oh well, I'm not sure if that student's data is actually correct. Yes, it is, it's the best example, it's the best benchmark of occupancy that we have. And then you corroborate that with student crowd data, looking at rent drops, looking at offers and incentives, and you start to see actually, yeah, the picture isn't quite so great in terms of performance for pbsa this year. Now, that's not to say it's not going to be a later market and it won't recover. But it's not looking great, especially when you start to think about some of the other headwinds that we have within the industry, which we'll we'll come on to in a second you know I both agree with you, but I guess just playing devil's advocate is there is a laziness there, because even if you present that, is it their job?

Speaker 3:

I guess what I'm saying. Is it their job to provide that information? Because their job is to, I best, sell assets as best they can. But in a room full of experts where they know they're going to show that data, you kind of think you'd say this is our information, this is our data. But you need to go and check your sources and I guess there's an ownership on investors to do their due diligence and ask those questions and say, well, hang on a minute, what about the number of students commuting, what you know? So I guess my question is is it their job? I agree with you both that it's dangerous and it's wrong, and I've this, I mean back in when I first joined the sector. I was complaining about this when we were getting demand reports around. Just literally, here's all the students and here's all the buildings, like yeah, but they're not all going to live in there. So where's the real data?

Speaker 1:

I think we're. They're marking their own homework. This is the problem that we have these reach research bodies that are sort of linked or you know the sort of research department that's linked to each of these sales agencies. They're providing reports. Now I, I know a lot of them and they're great people. They're very honest and I and they will definitely see I know you could tell by some of the questions where they were squirming on stage a little bit after presenting that you can see that they know what's happening and you know they're kind of caught in two minds Like how much do we actually put out there?

Speaker 1:

Oh, we've got this old data which shows that the market's good. Okay, we'll just use that again. That's fine. That worked last year. Everyone seemed okay. I just don't think that cuts it anymore and that's. It's great for us.

Speaker 1:

Like I said on the LinkedIn post, it's great for us at Resi Consultancy because we do a lot of market reports where people come to us because they don't believe what the agents putting in their reports.

Speaker 1:

They don't believe that 70% of students cannot access PBSA in Coventry and they don't believe that you know you should buy and build in Leeds or Nottingham because there's more than a 33% gap between the supply and demand and they're worried that BTR, student, hmo and all of these other factors aren't pulled into some of this data.

Speaker 1:

And yeah, the data is crap in higher education and in PBSA and HMO and it's very difficult to piece together. But that's their job, it's on them, they've got to do it. But I suppose if someone's trying to sell you something in some way, shape or form, you do have to take it with a pinch of salt as to what they're actually telling you. And I think we need to kind of move away from the fact that, yes, they can provide some really good glossy reports and they can understand and oversee some of the market performance as a whole. But when it comes to some of that more, yeah, the analysis of that data that is a slight concern and I think it will be a concern for me as well if someone like student crowd starts to get into that sort of stage as well, talking about supply and and demand in greater detail or maybe putting their own kind of spin on that. That's a bit of a concern. I've started to see some of that.

Speaker 2:

I think and I know that this is a rose-tinted view, blue sky thinking, etc. Etc. Is that there must be some opportunities in some cities. So if you take away how many BTR beds there are and in pipeline and how many HMOs there are, how much university accommodation there is, how many commuting students there are, and you end up with that figure, you know, are they not using that data? Because there aren't any and actually there are no markets in the UK that actually have a little bit of headroom for more PBSA. I don't believe that. I'm pretty sure that there are some cities that it works for. Why don't you show those, because there's going to be amazing opportunities in those? Why keep flogging the same cities that are, you know, sleepwalking, not even sleepwalking very consciously, walking, you know, into an oversupply? You know, and that's what we all want to see, let's have some new information and be wowed by some of these amazing opportunities that are out there.

Speaker 3:

And I think that's the point is that back when I came into the sector, that information wasn't as readily available and it wasn't as easily accessible, and it is now, so there really isn't an excuse for it, in that sense that you need to be aware that there's all this data out there. We all know what's going on, so we need to be talking about it.

Speaker 1:

The only the issue is that the only people that win from all of this is the landowners. If the issue is that the only people that win from all of this is the landowners, if you're selling a plot of land in you know anywhere, to be completely honest, agents are going to be talking up that city. It doesn't matter if it's coventry or sheffield or nottingham or leeds or any other cities where you think, hang on a minute, I'm not sure I'd build there. They are the landowners. They're like great, you know, all of the agents are doing our job for us. We don't have to, we don't have to negotiate too hard. So there's only one winner there? Well, there's only two winners. It's the agents for the, you know, getting paid on the sale or the development. We're getting spades in the ground and it's the landowners.

Speaker 1:

And that, for me, is just nonsensical, especially when you think what we're building at the moment. It's an absolute shambles and it's so difficult to get anything through planning. But that is why it feels like there's a bit of scrabbling around from a lot of these agents and some of them have spun out of the bigger agencies and they're trying to carve a niche or a name for themselves or, you know, make their own money rather than giving it to the man, as it were. So, yeah, I just think you need to be a little bit careful. Hopefully, any new investors coming into the sector can actually see that and will heed the warnings. But yeah, it was just so jarring, wasn't it? At LD. Anyway, I think that's enough on agents, and yeah, I highly recommend LD events for anyone. There's a few other LD events coming up resi events and living events coming up, so well worth going to them too, especially if you have an interest in BTR as well as PBSA. So now a quick word from our sponsor.

Speaker 3:

Wash Station proudly sponsor this episode of Housed. We provide best in class laundry solutions that complement your buildings. Wash Station Smart.

Speaker 2:

Green Clean.

Speaker 1:

Thanks very much to Wash Station, grateful for for having having them on board. Do reach out to them if you've got any questions on laundry and they will be happy to provide some insights. For sure, we're very grateful that they are sponsoring house for this season and we hope to have them on board again. So, moving swiftly on to another potential headwind for the sector, which I mean, I'm furious. You could give me half an hour now and I'd happily tell you quite how furious I am and why. But it is the immigration white paper that was published last week, as you said, sarah, just before LD events. So pretty bad timing for everyone speaking on stage. The event so pretty bad timing for everyone speaking on stage.

Speaker 1:

But the key proposals that came out of that white paper and we should just say it is a white paper, it's not necessarily going straight through his policy, so there may be a certain element of shock factor here. But they the government under Keir Starmer is looking to reduce the graduate route for undergrads and master student and cut it from two years to 18 months. So students are then allowed to stay in the UK for a maximum of 18 months after they graduate. That was previously two years. We're seeing in Europe. There are other countries offering incentives of up to five years for international students. That's how much they want to attract them. Yeah, there'll be a stricter visa sponsorship process which will probably bring about, you know anything, up to 15,000 fewer international students. There'll be a levy on international tuition fees paid by students or, potentially, universities. And then we are yeah, we're looking to tax, possibly at 6%, the earnings of international students as soon as they graduate.

Speaker 1:

I mean, it was a major curveball. There's other things we could talk about there, but that that's enough for us to be going on with. It was a major curveball. It feels like a huge own goal. But then we would say that, because we're from the higher education and PBSA sector, we want international education to be really one of the pillars of our economy and unfortunately, this is going to hamper and hinder that and possibly, in certain locations, decimate it. Sarah Dini, I mean, obviously, obviously you saw it. I know we've talked about it at length, but how, how surprised were you that that was the stance taken by kia starmer and the labour government?

Speaker 3:

very, I guess, but not so surprised.

Speaker 3:

I think this I mean, there's so much going on beyond the world that we talk about in this area that it is you know, we've said this before they're trying to fix something without looking at the totality of the picture, and it's just fixing one thing and breaking lots of other things in the process.

Speaker 3:

And and the problem is that whatever you do in this area, someone's always going to complain and say, well, it's too much, it's not going to work, you need to do more. And in terms of the damage to international students and universities, it's huge. And it kind of just feels like it's totally ignoring the fact that universities are living off international students anyway. So the only way that we can even keep our universities alive and keep our domestic students being educated is by bringing international students, and it kind of totally ignores that. And it's just really sad really that we can't separate this out for the many great things that international students bring to this country without staying here forever. But it's just frustrating that again and again we have these conversations and yet it's still an ongoing conversation that people are trying to fix with the wrong things, it seems.

Speaker 2:

I think one interesting perspective that I heard is we know, because we work in the sector, that international students have been on the decline anyway. So actually they're kind of they're on to a good thing, aren't they? Because whatever they do now, it'll show how brilliant they were and how much they reduced immigration that was already reducing anyway. So it feels like they've really really been focusing on the wrong area. I think everybody expected this to be focused on illegal immigration and it actually seems to only be focused on legal immigration, which you know there's, like Dini said, there there's many, many good things in students and beyond students that that legal immigrants bring, and I am, I am a descendant of immigrants, so I would, I would suggest that, and I think our country is, you know, stronger and richer for it. So I'm very frustrated as well for it. I think, if we start to look at what it could mean for the housing sector I kind of link it back to what Richard Ward said from students at the LD event that 47% of all pipeline beds are studios. We know that's to, in inverted commas, make the investment appraisal stack up, but the reality is a domestic student will generally have a lower budget. So are these developers and investors willing to drop the price and contract length of studios to ensure occupancy by a domestic student if there are less international students? You know that's the impact that it could have.

Speaker 2:

We know that there's a lot of international students living in BTR as well, you know. So that could impact the BTR market. You know, over and above and it's really kind of like what we talk about often is, your domestic student is always going to be your over and above, and it's really kind of like what we talk about often is, your domestic student is always going to be your bread and butter. There's so many economic, political, geographical instabilities that go on that impact international students. This is just another one you know.

Speaker 2:

So I think you know, will those pipeline properties actually come through? Will they be built out? Because I can't see that if you take out your reliance on international students, you take out your reliance on studios and you take out your reliance on 51 week contracts, I'm not sure how viable they're going to be anymore and I just urge the developers and the investors to think long and hard about what a product for an undergraduate domestic student would look like, because you know they are the stable numbers and I know that we have to counter that with commuting students as well, because there are a lot of domestic commuting students. But I think it's a little bit chicken and egg actually. If there was more suitable, affordable accommodation, then more students would be less likely to commute, but they're not going to do it if the only thing on offer is 51 week studios at a high rate and I, oh god, I'm just so frustrated with the Labour government.

Speaker 1:

I'm a Labour voter and I wanted this moment to be. You know, I'm not naive. I appreciate that Keir Starmer can't necessarily stand up to Donald Trump, in particular on, you know, trade or whatever else it might be, but I do want him to stand up to reform and Farage in particular. Farage is like our Trump and thankfully he's more intelligent than Trump. I mean, it's not difficult. It's not difficult. There goes my visa for the us, but I, you know, there's still that kind of megalomania, egomaniac, narcissist tendencies. He's purely about the power forage and he is. It's a cult of personality that reform is garnering here and the government are trying to appease potential reform voters by governing through daily mail headlines and this. This, for me, is the most frustrating thing of all. I genuinely thought that there would be this love actually moment where, you know, hugh Grant, our prime minister in love, actually stands up to the US president, billy Bob Thornton, because they're trying to negotiate too hard in in in a trade deal. There's some other reasons behind it as well, but I really want to see that from Keir Starmer and he is not being bold enough. He's not being brave enough. I think that is a real measure of how scared Labour are of reform, and you only have to look at some of the polls which are putting Farage and reform ahead of Labour for the next election. I actually think that in doing what he's done here, keir Starmer is more likely to lose the next election by continuing to appease reform voters.

Speaker 1:

I know he's trying to go after the Red Wall those Brexit voting Labour voters but it's such an own goal for the higher education sector. It will bring about quicker bankruptcies from certain universities because there is no doubt that our reputation has taken another hit here. We took enough of a hit last year with the conservative government stopping and banning the dependent visas for students. That was pretty catastrophic. There's some universities that are still feeling the fallout from that and it was you that was. That was pretty brutal and really affected our reputation.

Speaker 1:

I've already spoken to a lot of marketplaces post last week who are saying we're really now expecting our numbers to be down for this year and next quite significantly, and by significantly you're talking kind of 15 to 20 percent down. For some of these marketplaces that's just purely on talking to them, trying not looking at the data but then trying to sort of put across how students are talking to them about it, what they're looking for, how they're feeling, what the sentiment is across agents and marketplaces, in particular from India. I think this is one of the major problems that we'll have. Indian Indian numbers have fallen post-COVID. We had a bit of a COVID boom and now they're falling again, same with Nigerian students. We're just making, we're becoming a really hostile nation and you know what everyone's saying is that Australia is poised to clean up here before any of these potential caps come in, but massive own hole from the government.

Speaker 1:

I'm really disappointed in sir keir starmer. I would have expected some stronger leadership to stand up for the rights of international students in the uk ideally stripping them out from the net migration figures and standing up for the higher education sector, because they're flat broke. Universities are flat broke and we have to accept this. The only way to help to improve the health of our higher education sector is to streamline the courses and make sure that we are you know they're running as lean as they can. That is being done to a certain extent. Yes, reduce the pension contributions, because they're absolutely ridiculous and I know that not popular me saying that with anyone in the higher education sector, but please do have a think about what that should be and could be from a private sector perspective and why you know that gets quite so much blame, and I just think it's going to be a disaster for universities. So yeah, I mean, if they've lost the next election not just on that, but just on trying to appease reform, then you heard it here first.

Speaker 2:

I think just one note, kind of from a sales and marketing perspective. Obviously that's mine and Dini's kind of specialism and we always look at changes that are going to going to impact. This is, you know, the new kind of potential stringent visa processes will mean that those international students are potentially going to become even later in the market than they already are, because it's going to take so long to process those you know, those visas. So the marketing really really needs to fit in with with those. You know those timings and really think about your strategy throughout the year and who you're, you know who you're targeting and when. You know who you're targeting and when you know you're targeting them. You know, because flinging a load of international marketing in February when people haven't organized their visas yet is probably going to, you know, be be wasted really.

Speaker 2:

And I think the other note I don't know if you're about to say that, dan for this year is that negative narrative. It might even impact the students that have applied this year because if that white paper comes to fruition and the graduate visa route is reduced, the students that applied for university for this, you know, to start in September will have done it on the basis that they thought they were getting two years. Now if they're suddenly told yeah, only be given 18 months, then actually that might change their decision making process so you might see loads of cancellations. So I'd say that any sales and marketing department operations you've got to be really, really in tune with what's going on in the wider market. We talk about this a lot in our sales training is that, you know, everybody has to understand what's going on in the kind of the macro housing you know and higher education markets. If you work in PBSA.

Speaker 1:

Totally agree and I think, yeah, we are dealing with some major headwinds there from the government again, which isn't helpful. But also, universities aren't particularly helping themselves when it comes to applications and getting back to people. I have seen firsthand a lot of Chinese students in particular saying I applied for a university, it took them four months, six months sometimes, to get back to me and because of that I've actually gone somewhere else. I've heard that quite a lot about the University of Edinburgh. At the moment I'm not sure whether I should really be putting that out there, but it's all over social media in China. So I think universities have to get their houses in order as well, to make sure that, in view of, you know, reducing international student numbers and reducing postgrad numbers, that they are on top of the applications.

Speaker 1:

Maybe Edinburgh, maybe other universities that have got that problem are just hedging their bets on, uh, the qualifications required for certain courses. I don't think that is. I actually think they're under resourced or their processes are crap. All their systems are crap, like it's who knows. But yeah, that's, that's just my, that's just my thought yeah, and I just wanted to add to the damage.

Speaker 3:

A lot of damage has been done to international student perception of higher education in the UK and whatever happens with the white paper, it's always going to be a challenge to fix that and that's going to take time. But when we're talking about strategy and we're talking about being prepared for what the future holds, the damage has also been done to domestic students in terms of actually attractiveness to go and study away, to go and live away. We don't have the right products for them in the right places and it's not going to change overnight. That. You can't just say, oh well, I'll just switch to domestic students and that'll fix it. It's going to take universities and accommodation providers to work together and fix that over two or three years to encourage more domestic students back into living away at university with the right products and the right things in places.

Speaker 3:

And again, it's just that you know my constant nag that we're so slow to do things that we really need to start thinking about this now, because this is always going to be a push and a pull of different things going on and you've got to be prepared for these. We always talk about this product diversity. But domestic students are finding it less attractive to go and study because it's really expensive and that isn't going to change and it's going to take a two or three year cycle, maybe even more, to shift that back doesn't mean that we can't change it, but we're gonna have to do the work to change it yeah, I, I completely agree.

Speaker 1:

I, like I said we could, we could have a whole podcast on that and it would just be all of us ranting about what's just happened and what the government have just done. It'd be interesting to see exactly, when that comes to fruition, what it actually looks like and whether this was the government really testing the waters to see what uproar there was. I didn't see a huge amount coming from anyone in the sector universities, uk or anyone or anyone else like that. So I would like to see that Vivian Stern is at UK Reef so hopefully we'll get time to catch her there, but it could be pretty catastrophic. I wouldn't play down the potential impact of that, six months in particular, but you know the six month graduate route reduction but also then 6% of your income for an international student then going back to the government in the UK. That's just absolutely scandalous from my perspective. Anyway, on to a break where we hear from our sponsor, utopia.

Speaker 3:

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Speaker 1:

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Speaker 2:

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Speaker 1:

Thanks very much to Utopia. Please do reach out to them now. We are going to be very much watching out for more government announcements over the course of this week. In particular, dini, what are you going to be looking out for?

Speaker 3:

well, I think the one that we're all looking out for is this youth mobility scheme, which I'm always supportive of because I thought taking that away from our young people the ability to go and live and work in Europe was a real strategy. Obviously we've had a few announcements around this and that I think it's 18 to possibly 30 35 year olds will be able to come to the UK and get a two-year work visa and I think, sarah, you were saying that there is some talk of that that will also extend to universities and paying the same as domestic students. Obviously there's going to be uproar from many factions around that introduction and actually I had a bit of a kind of education moment with my kids in the car, because it kind of feels a bit joyless to turn around and just say oh, we shouldn't have youth mobility and it's like why not give young people the opportunity to travel and experience life? And then had to explain Brexit to my kids again after. After many, many conversations.

Speaker 3:

I have got a funny story about that, about taking my eldest, who was about three at the time, on a Brexit march and she spent the rest of the afternoon saying why are they putting breadsticks in the bin as they're all chanting Brexit, brexit, let's put Brexit in the bin. But she thought it was breadsticks. Anyway, that's an aside, I just think it's. You know, it's obviously going to have an impact. If that has an impact on students, potentially, we'll see, but it will obviously potentially change the kind of the number of EU people, young people, coming into this country.

Speaker 2:

I think you know I've got teenagers, and the oldest one in particular would love to travel and have the opportunity to work abroad.

Speaker 2:

So you know, from a personal point of view, I think this is fantastic for the opportunities that will bring young people.

Speaker 2:

I find it very, very disjointed in relation to the immigration white paper that we're kind of, you know, we're saying, well, we don't mind those students coming here and working, but we don't want those other ones coming working here. And I know it's to strengthen EU ties because of all the damage that was made through Brexit. So I understand that, but I think it's very disjointed, it's very short sighted as well, disjointed. It's very short-sighted as well and actually it's kind of like it feels like they need to take a step back and look at what it means for young people, immigration and emigration in and out of the country, you know, and that why should some get certain conditions and some get other conditions? So it would be great if those two announcements were a bit more tied up, really, and a bit more there was some consciousness that they were related in some way, whereas it feels like they're completely separate announcements with completely separate agendas. You know which the government they are.

Speaker 1:

So it seems like the government likes European students and doesn't like non-EU students, and I can't help thinking that that is very much a daily mail thing. And, and by that I mean, is this racism? Is this just veiled racism? And we don't want Indian or Nigerian students, but we're quite happy to take the Italians and the Spanish. I I really worry about this. We are heading down a dark path. If that is the case, and anytime that you try to appease the likes of a Farage or the Reform Party or Richard Tice or anyone like that, you're in real danger of racism, either veiled or fully transparent racism, or xenophobia at the very least, and I don't like it. I think you've got to have more joined up thinking.

Speaker 1:

But it just comes back again to the government firefighting. That's what they're doing at the moment. They are putting out little fires here and there, trying to keep the polls, you know, trying to keep the gap between them and reform in the polls to as small as possible before the next election, and it is just not working for them. There is no joined up thinking, there's no strategy or policy. We still haven't seen planning reform, yet we still haven't seen any kind of higher education policies that really make sense for higher education, to make it more resilient and stronger and, you know, make us that sort of leading superpower in higher education again. And we certainly haven't seen any joined up thinking in student housing or anything like that. I keep and I'm sure you do too, and when you talk about it I'm getting so many people say we have nobody representing us in with the government and we cannot talk to anyone. Nobody's getting back to us and this is some pretty high level people and I just think something needs to be done. But yeah, so go. You know, that's, that's a tangent and certainly an episode for another time, after some conversations this week, hopefully. But yeah, I think it's xenophobic and racist, if I'm being completely honest to separate the two things and have a really stringent policy against one and then be opening the floodgates again to the others. Not that I don't want EU students. I really do Like they fell off a cliff after Brexit and I have taken advantage of that previously. I've lived and worked in France during my degree in particular, and then afterwards. So yeah, I'm all for it. But let's call it for what it is. I think it's veiled racism and xenophobia and on that bombshell, I think it's probably time to wrap up, primarily because my train leaves in 20 minutes for Leeds.

Speaker 1:

So thank you very much to my Student Halls for being our headline sponsor of this season. Dan and the team your support is hugely appreciated. You've been with us from the start, so thank you very much. Thanks very much to the team at Utopia and Wash Station, of course, for coming on board for season four. We know that people are wanting to reach out to you both as well, so thank you very much for sponsoring this season. If you work in the pbsa, btr, co-living, hmo and university accommodation sectors and you enjoy our weekly podcast, please do give it a rating and review it. Wherever you do listen to your podcasts uh, it really does help us reach more people. I know I hear stephen bartlett say that all the time, but we've actually started to see numbers pick up just because we're getting more ratings and more subscribers. So thank you very much for that.

Speaker 1:

So on Thursday at UK Reef at 1.15pm, on the markets and sector stage, sarah is going to be hosting a session.

Speaker 1:

So the title is Student Accommodation and PBSA Investment Continues to Look Strong Despite Several Market Headwinds. How is the sector building in resilience while keeping pace with the changing demands of students. Love that title First bit. Maybe you know sounds like it's written by an agent, but at least you've got a lot of mention of headwinds in there and I think that's super important and that will be a brilliant session. Anyone who's everyone from PBSA will certainly be there, so do try and catch that. So, yeah, don't leave until you've watched it. And on friday, sarah and dean are hosting a podcast for housing hand about their recent report on what tenants really understand about the rental process that we talked about last week. So if you're interested in delving into that insight further, make sure you sign up for that and tune in in two weeks time to hear all about uk reef. We are going to be taking a break for half term next week, so thank you very much for listening. We hope this wasn't too ranty today, but lots to talk about, and we hope you've enjoyed the podcast today.