The event was a sell-out again, with people unable to get tickets, which is the clearest signal that Andrew and the LD Events team have built something the sector genuinely values. The Kia Oval was a genuine venue step-up and I loved seeing daylight during the day and a non-reverberating sound system. The pitchside drinks were an extremely civilised way to end the day. If you have never chaired a conference at a world leading cricket ground, I would recommend it – aside from all the prep work.
The tone across the sessions felt like we were having a more honest conversation than in some previous years. My keynote framed four structural forces shaping the sector: demand dynamics, affordability, regulation and university finances. The day’s sessions collectively validated that framing. Knight Frank’s Katie O’Neill captured the mood well: healthy transaction volumes and strong capital appetite on one side, occupancy pressure, affordability constraints and an ageing UK stock profile on the other. UK PBSA investment reached £4.3 billion in 2025, up 10% year on year, with £2.1 billion deployed so far in Q1 2026 alone. But 63% of UK beds were built pre-2012, top-end rents are now softening, and incentive use continues to climb. The market is not broken, but it is telling us something. And Katie’s red-hot tip was to go long on Europe.
The product mismatch ran through several sessions. Sarah Turner-Jones’s (Cushman & Wakefield) data showed that nearly 20% of all beds are now priced above the maximum maintenance loan, up from less than 4% in 2016/17. Development is viable in only a few markets, but the balance between viability and affordability is a tightrope walk. Poor old Nottingham came out as the poster city typifying many of the structural issues being faced with demand down 6,570 in two years, supply up 4,302 in the same period, and occupancy pain concentrated heavily in peripheral and lower-quality assets.
The increase in commuter students was a common theme. UCAS reported a record 31% of UK 18-year-old accepted applicants in 2025 intending to live at home, up from 22% a decade earlier, with the proportion reaching 52% among the most disadvantaged quintile. That is not just a demand issue. It is a social mobility concern.
StudentCrowd‘s segmentation of UK markets into Stable Traditionalists, Incentive Intense and Quietly Dynamic types gives operators a genuinely actionable framework for thinking through where their assets sit in all of this. Its headline: a full building and a loyal one are different things, and the data now exists to tell them apart. And: step up your cleaning and maintenance, people.
The impact of the Renters Rights Act on HMOs and PBSA was debated. There is definitely an increase of interest in the corporately owned HMO sector, and the interaction between the top end of the HMO market and the affordable end of PBSA will be interesting as HMO numbers decline with more and more private landlords selling. Combine this with the increasing interest from universities in where returners are living and there has to be an opportunity for PBSA.
On the European opportunity, the presentations made the case compellingly for Iberia, Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux and emerging markets. All pointed to the same structural reality: European PBSA is approximately seven years behind the UK in institutional maturity, and the supply gap is not closing fast. Spain’s bed to student provision rate sits at 6%-7% against a 17% EU average and 32% in the UK. Germany has provision rates of 8%-12% despite housing Europe’s largest student market. Warsaw’s is only 2%. The shift in emphasis, strongly articulated by Stoneshield, is from capital deployment to execution quality. Capital has recognised the opportunity. Planning friction, land scarcity, construction cost inflation and the need for deep local networks mean returns will increasingly be driven by operating intensity and platform capability rather than market position alone.
The session that will stay with me longest (and I’m not just saying that because he’s from SFG) was Robert Kingham presenting our research with Unite Students on the condition of university residential estates. The scale of the problem is striking. More than 60% of university-owned accommodation falls below the level of quality that students now expect. Addressing quality issues in the existing stock requires £13.8 billion, or £17.3 billion if you allow for some density increase in the redevelopment stock. Our modelling shows 70,600 net additional beds (across university and private PBSA) are needed to ensure no UK student housing market has a student-to-bed ratio greater than 1.9 : 1 by 2029/30. Yet only around 60% of those additional or replacement beds are likely to be viable at current rent levels, leaving a substantial portion of necessary supply without a clear commercial delivery route. That excludes any rooms that a university calls time on and decides to replace in that period.
Set our research against the Office for Students’ finding that 45% of regulated institutions face deficits in 2025/26 and you can see that the funding gap is more like a funding chasm. Universities have systematically prioritised visible new development over the maintenance and improvement of what they already own, and the consequences are now undeniable. As Whittam Cox’s Nick Riley observed, the challenge is not just energy performance or ESG compliance. Older stock simply does not reflect what students want or need, and partial occupancy compounds the operational problem significantly. With universities having no money to fund the necessary work themselves, that can only point to more and more partnerships.
The university panel, with senior people from Newcastle, Southampton, LSE and Manchester, offered an unusually candid view of how partnership decisions are actually made from the institutional side. The message was consistent: universities that do the homework, understand their estate, know their options and go to market with a clear brief are getting good outcomes, but everyone could do partnerships better next time around. The era of speculative development dominating is possibly behind us in most markets. The era of structured, purpose-built partnership is getting underway.
Nick Riley’s session also raised a genuinely fresh question about flexibility and product adaptation. With 25%-30% of students now living at home, the question of how PBSA serves commuter students is becoming commercially significant. Early-stage concepts around BedPods, fold-down guest beds and club-style amenity membership for non-residents point in a direction the sector will need to take more seriously over the next few years. On sustainability, new build standards have broadly converged on Passivhaus and BREEAM Excellent as baseline expectations. It is retrofit where delivery remains uneven and cost and programme challenges are most acute, particularly given Building Safety Act Gateway requirements for high-risk buildings undergoing refurbishment. Environmental performance remains a non-negotiable for universities, debt providers and investors despite the viability issues and associated costs.
I’ll repeat Nick Hillman of HEPI’s quote that I closed the conference with:
“The argument for the residential student experience has to be made loudly, clearly, and repeatedly, because the arrangements that worked so well for PBSA for so long can no longer be taken for granted.”
This conference showed a sector that is, on the whole, making that argument with evidence, nuance and honesty about how to move forward, which has to be the right starting point.
Same time next year. Book early.
Martin Hadland
Founder & Managing Director
May 2026
