It’s hard not to feel a deep sense of despondency when reading the Unipol/HEPI interim student accommodation costs report.
The exercise is usually carried out every three years by Unipol and NUS – but given the weight of anecdotal evidence that something dramatic and significant has been happening to rents since 2021’s exercise, Unipol resolved to run a shorter and more tightly focussed version of the exercise this summer.
The headline – at least in the ten key city markets chosen to reflect a range of supply/demand scenarios – is that student rents have gone up by an average of 14.6% over the past two academic years, and now “swallow up” pretty much all of the average maintenance loan on offer to students from England.
“Crisis” is an overused word – but when Victoria Tolmie-Loverseed, who is Unipol’s Assistant Chief Executive, says that student housing has reached a crisis point in affordability, she’s clearly right:
Rents are rising rapidly just as real-terms government support has stagnated. With rents consuming unhealthy levels of an average maintenance loan, students are being forced to take desperate measures – illegally doubling up in rooms, taking on increasing amounts of paid work or even avoiding university altogether due to costs.
