Effective LinkedIn marketing, the popularity of HMOs and the Amber fundraise

In this sixth episode of Housed, we cover:

- Effective LinkedIn Marketing: Our journey to building a business on LinkedIn, packed with insights on crafting a winning content strategy.
- The Popularity of HMOs: Why HMOs remain a go-to choice for students, offering a slice of home and independence.
-  The Amber Fundraise Impact: Discussions around the impressive £21 million fundraising and its potential ripple effects in the student accommodation market.

Housed: The Shared Living Podcast aims to bring the latest news, views and insights to the shared living sector.

Each week, Sarah Canning, Deenie Lee of The Property Marketing Strategists and Daniel Smith of Student Housing 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, Operational Real Estate or Shared Living.

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

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixth episode of How's the Shared Living podcast. I'm Deanie Lee from the Property Marketing Strategists.

SPEAKER_01: 0:09

I'm Dan Smith from Student Housing Consultancy.

SPEAKER_00: 0:11

And I'm Sarah Canning from the Property Marketing Strategists. Right guys, we're on episode six. I think all's going well. I think we're enjoying being our podcast hosts and seeing what's going on in Sarah's mind throughout the week. But what have we been up to the last week or so? As a property marketing strategist, we're just wrapping up some work on a big piece of international research about what international students want from their accommodation. So we're looking forward to sharing more of that insight over the next few weeks. But in a nutshell, 2,000 young people who are studying across the globe and who are from lots of different demographics have told us what they want from their student accommodation. And it's not a surprise, but it's also good to reaffirm our assumptions, which is that different demographics want different things from their home and they're actually quite nuanced. So that partnership between where you're living, where you're studying, where you're from, where your university is, is really, really key. So I won't give away too many spoilers, but that's taking up quite a lot of our time with the analysis and writing up and making it into a beautiful report for you all. And it has been fascinating to go through some of that data and just really understand what different segments are saying. And as we always say, segmentation and understanding your customer is really key. So I think we're very excited to share that with everyone soon.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41

What's taken up most of my time this week is man flu. You may be able to hear. But yeah, so I've been at death's door. Dini, Sarah, you have no idea quite how bad man flu is, obviously.

SPEAKER_00: 1:52

Obviously not, no.

SPEAKER_01: 1:55

But yeah, so yeah, that's knocked out a couple of my days this week. But the rest of it's been quite a lot of client work, a few interesting feasibility studies for new buildings. Luckily, not in locations that I wouldn't build them. So yeah, there's quite a few good potential projects out there at the moment, seeing quite a few opportunities for both co-living and student accommodation. And some of them are starting to become a little bit more blended with the planning permission. You know, there's a lot of applications that are starting to go in with joint planning permission in terms of young professionals and students. I've had that before at NIDO in Southampton, but it's becoming more and more an opportunity for investors and developers to be a bit more defensive about the asset and and be able to convert it as and when they they see fit so yeah really interesting propositions coming across the desk at the moment which is great

SPEAKER_00: 2:48

it's been a really really busy start to the year i think i think we've been commenting on the the calls that we've been having and like it feels like january started with a bang and hasn't really stopped but it's interesting to hear that actually you're kind of seeing that increase in planning commissions and these see where the year takes us. I think one thing that's interesting about what you just said Dan is we often talk about sustainability as in kind of the things that you can add to a building to make it more sustainable but actually planning for the future in a building is actually really really sustainable so that's really really positive that people are looking at kind of blended living co-living and different ways because then it doesn't rely on one risky segment of the market if a building can be used in the future to house different types of people in different ways. So is that part of the purpose, do you think, that people are looking into that way of living?

SPEAKER_01: 3:42

Yeah, I do think it's a defensive strategy to stop them having stranded assets a little bit further down the line. Because, you know, there's no point having a co-living building and a student accommodation building next to each other where they're both 60% full. And I do think there's a real opportunity, certainly in markets that are more mature, to, you know, really bring about more young professionals, graduates and students kind of living side by side with each other. You know, I've seen that that can work if it's carefully managed. And I think there's quite a few developers out there that are hoping that that is the kind of thing that will work. Some of these projects that I'm looking at are refurbs. Some are developments from the ground up. So it's just really interesting to see that it's not just trying to sort of retro fit your planning permission around, you know, what the sort of current state of the market is now. It's also the new building starting to look at, okay, what's it going to look like in 10 years? So it feels a little bit, you know, there's always a sort of core of students that are, you know, heading to university either domestics or internationals. Feels a little bit more volatile this year than it has in a while, certainly post-COVID. So it's just interesting to see that developers are starting to think along those lines already.

SPEAKER_00: 4:53

No, that's great. A good roundup of what we've all been up to. So this week, we wanted to have a bit of chat about... LinkedIn as a marketing channel. I think we're very open, Sarah and I, that we've built our business on LinkedIn. It's been great for us. It's not come easy. We've worked very hard to kind of build up our network, build up our content strategy, build up our LinkedIn. But what's our views? I think, Dina, you just probably hit the nail on the head by talking about a content strategy. And that's, you know, from us, I guess what it comes down to. People comment all the time about that they've seen something that we've seen on, you know, that they've read on LinkedIn. And we have lots of people come up to us at events who know us through LinkedIn. We don't know them personally, but they know us because of our profile. And we've been quite open and honest about our business and we create content that complements that. But we spend as a team, not just me and Dini, but we spend hours and hours and hours creating content and it has to be valuable. We don't just wake up one morning and decide to pop something on LinkedIn. We're constantly researching, we're listening, we're reading, we're sharing valuable content. We have no idea what the algorithm is doing and we don't care, quite frankly. If we haven't got anything to post, we won't post it. Whether that means that we only post twice a week or actually we've got loads to say and we'll post 10 times a week, we will do that if we've got something valuable to share. And that's, I guess, what we've built our content strategy around is things that that we actually think people want to read and kind of consume. It's not really about us.

SPEAKER_01: 6:30

It's not that I don't have a strategy around my content. Far from it. It's reasonably well curated. But what I... I took the approach that I wanted to see more transparency in the industry. I wanted people to be sharing best practice rather than guarding it. And I wanted to be calling out the bullshit and really holding people to account, if I'm being completely honest, by any of my posts on LinkedIn. And so I took that approach for the last four years, realistically, but primarily since I've founded Student Housing Consultancy. And it's really worked because, yeah, people do come up to you. And it sounds a bit sort of Ron Burgundy, you know, but I get a lot of people coming up and saying, really love what you're doing on LinkedIn, please keep doing it because it's all the things that we can't say because we're affiliated to an operator or a marketplace or a whatever, or an investor. And so I think people find it quite refreshing that as a consultant, we can kind of call out a lot of the behaviours that either we don't like or we do like. I'm more than happy to talk about pretty much anything that i read and if i don't understand it i will go and really investigate it and you know go down the rabbit hole to to really sort of fully understand the subject before posting on it and that's like looking at company accounts looking at financial reports really sort of digging deep press releases news news releases speaking to people as well i'll always you know make sure that i'm speaking to people in my network too and that really helps and it's it's built me a community of of almost 17 000 people who are sort of following what what i'm doing on linkedin and it does allow me to champion and champion certain people that i think are doing really well within the industry as well whether it's brands companies or or people and i think that goes a long way a long way too so yeah it's sort of It's a happy accident that I've ended up with quite such a following. It feels slightly strange talking about it, but it's fantastic for business because I have to do very little advertising off the back of it. And I've definitely built my personal brand around it, as they say. But I do think it's also something that operators, investors, everybody should be using more. We should be open. We should be transparent. There's some competitiveness, of course, and some commercialization. secrecy that needs to needs to happen so you can't be completely open but I'd like to see more personalities being open on LinkedIn and really sort of opening up the leadership of student accommodation, BTR, co-living, any of the sort of shared living sector, really, because it's really important that we have the right people in the right places. And I think that LinkedIn can really help you to do that.

SPEAKER_00: 9:14

You know, I was sort of brought up with saying, treat people how you want to be treated. And I think it's a similar process. If you've got to share something that you want to read or that you're going to be interested in reading or you engage with and then... Yeah, I always think that when it comes to design or things, it's about the simplicity of what is going to work for you will work for others. We manage a number of our clients' LinkedIn accounts in the B2B space. And it's really rewarding, actually, because I can't think of a single client that we haven't managed to bring business in via LinkedIn. And that doesn't mean that we're encouraging them to post salesy messages. Quite the opposite happens. it's about creating valuable content that people want to read, that they will engage with. And then they want to keep listening and then they want to do business with those people because it's an extension of you it's an extension of your brand and it's a really really important part of marketing you know we we're massive champions of it but like we said it takes time and effort and resource and we're quite open and upfront about that and the same goes with our clients if they want to create a brilliant linkedin strategy then we can work with them on that but it does take time effort and and consistency as well

SPEAKER_01: 10:30

yeah it it But you're right, though. It's not about posting every single day just for the sake of posting. And I don't pay much attention to the algorithms. Yes, I know which hashtags to use and when. Incidentally, the first three hashtags are the most important ones that you use. So just make sure that they're the key ones in the title. But I think it's just making sure that it's interesting what you're trying to say. It's not constantly salesy, like you said. There's a bit of transparency. There's some openness from leadership in particular. But at also at all levels of the business. So the more that we can see of that, the better. And for me, the topics that work really well is anything to do with data. When the latest data release comes out, I'm all over it and I will trawl through that data to find the anomalies or to find some of the key trends that are going to be interesting to marketplaces or operators, investors, et cetera, BTR, student accommodation or co-living. And that really... that gets huge engagement. I had one post get sort of 60,000 impressions last year, and that was around the student visas, the student visas with dependents being canned by the government. And yeah, that got a huge number of impressions. And then there's also, on the flip side, some of the things where you're like, I really want people to get this, I really would like this to get picked up, and for it to get loads of impressions, gets very little. So I kind of know what works now and what doesn't, but equally, it can still be a little bit hit and miss. So yeah, it's worth pulling together a credible LinkedIn strategy and it's certainly benefited my business, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 12:06

And I think it's always worth reminding yourself that because we immerse ourselves in our data all the time and sometimes we think, oh, people know this, but obviously we know it because we're looking at it all the time and we have to remind ourselves that actually it's good to share that because know people don't know it yeah i think data is king and and always will be and i love it and can get lost in it for hours on end i i'm sure we'll come back to that topic again but i think let's move on to our next one about why are hmos or houses of multiple occupancy continually so popular and what can the pbsa sector learn i hosted a panel on this at the property week student accommodation conference at the end of 2023 And I was really glad that HMOs were on the agenda. And through the research and through the planning of the panel, I learned a huge amount. And I think quite often in the PBSA sector, they can think that everything they're doing is right and that the buildings are full and the students are flocking. But actually we know, and the data shows, that there is a huge proportion of students who are choosing to live in HMOs. And we really hate it when the data says that there's so many students that aren't living in student accommodation. Well, actually they are, they're living in HMOs, and that they're not considered in the numbers. So really we started thinking about why, what is it? And I think we can't deny that there is a pull particularly for domestic students towards HMOs? And what is it that an HMO has over a PBSA building that continually pulls domestic students in? And I think through the research that we've done as well, particularly on layouts, I do think that's one of the key things really is that an HMO feels like a family home. It feels like something quite familiar that a lot of people will have been brought up in. And even if they've been brought up in apartments and flats, that configuration will generally be a much more communal living. There will be a living kitchen diner space and bedrooms will quite often be off that space. Very rarely in a home do you have a long dark corridor without any windows with all the bedrooms off with the kitchen at the end and that's what a lot of PBSAs are which a house just you know or an apartment in the private rented sector just can't really replicate. What do you guys think? Well this might be the point to launch my guilty secret that when I went off to university I never lived in student accommodation or halls of residence as they and went straight into a HMO and stayed in a HMO for my three years and going to visit my friends in halls, I very much felt exactly what you were saying, Sarah, that it was like this institutionalised place whereby you had a kitchen and you had a corridor and I went back to my kind of Victorian house with my mates and it felt like a home and it felt very much like I was a grown-up, you know, I'd kind of moved out of home and I'd gone into my own home and I think that You know, despite building my career in PBSA and understanding all the great things about PBSA, that sense of independence that you get about having your own home and having your own front room and being able to run that house together as your university family. It's quite compelling, really. And I think there's, we've probably made some inroads into it in PBSA, but I think there's still a way to go to kind of really give that sense of this is your place. This is your home to kind of go and create for you and be independent and be your first step to adulthood.

SPEAKER_01: 15:43

I think when I went to uni, All those years ago at Loughborough, it was very much first year you would go into halls. They were the heady days of undergraduate guarantees for domestic and international students. And then in the second year, your rite of passage was that you would go into an HMO with six or eight of your friends that you'd met in your first year. And then you'd probably see out your time in an HMO, a typical sort of five, six bed house, normally a Victorian terrace house, that kind of thing. And And I think that things are now changing. I do think that PBSA is certainly a compelling option for international students in particular, who are maybe slightly more discerning. And I do think that the domestic students are still quite focused on HMO. The issue that we've got is that the data is absolute crap. From the universities or any of the bodies, trade bodies, government bodies, there's very little data on exactly where students live. But I did see Mark Corver from Data HE. He's well worthwhile on LinkedIn, actually, focusing on where students are living. He's taken the HESA data and effectively, I think it was about 35% of students will live in an HMO and sort of less than 10% live in in university halls and then about 8% or so in PBSA. That's from 2021 because HESA is ridiculously out of date as ever. But I think that shows just how important the HMO market is. And at PBSA, I would class myself as a PBSA person rather than an HMO person, but I'm having to learn a lot more about HMO partly because some of my clients now have HMOs or there's more institutional investment that's looking to actually get into HMOs as well. I think there's a real opportunity there to heavily invest best in portfolios that I think would perform very well. But the issue is that with HMOs, of course, there's a lot going against them at the moment in terms of the renters reform bill and, you know, the energy legislation is the new EPC legislation. So it's not actually going to be that easy to be an HMO landlord.

SPEAKER_00: 17:52

I think the other thing that we see quite often with this kind of HMO PBSA split really is groups. And, you know, as marketeers, it's something that when we have B2C clients in the student space that we look at quite a lot is encouraging groups. We talk about rooms. If you're renting a room, that doesn't feel like a home. If we start talking about flats and that you can book as groups, then suddenly it does change it. But there's still a perception in the sector that you can't book as groups. And part of the reason behind that is the booking systems don't allow it very easily or at all. So when people come to book, if they can book as a group, they have to usually just send an email or put a note on their booking form. Oh, I would like to live with so-and-so. So they can, but it doesn't feel like it's like the first option. So therefore, until that happens, it doesn't feel like the natural place that you would go with your group of friends. PBSA feels very much like the place that you go when you don't know anyone else, or you want to live in a studio flat by yourself, or you've arrived in the country and, you know, you just don't know that group yet to live in. It's something that we... We try very hard with our clients. I worked very hard with it when I was marketing director at Student Roost, who, again, really, really tried really hard to reframe what a student home is. It's not just a room. But I think generally as the market goes and HMO still feels like that place of family living, like Dini said, with your university family.

SPEAKER_01: 19:25

Yeah, I think the interesting thing as well is that the gap is closing between HMO and PBSA in terms of the things that are provided. You'll never get the amenities unless you're in a really good sort of location near a gym or whatever it might be but in terms of the bills and the all-inclusive and the likes of uni homes have done a hell of a lot to bring HMO sort of into the into the current year to ultimately make sure that students don't have the hassle of splitting bills all the time or you know setting up their own bills then having to cancel them or whatever they'll take that headache away and I think that you know I've seen a few other bill splitting services but yeah uni homes are the ones that seem to have really push that forward, working with letting agents to really offer all inclusive prices. And that is a real game changer for students because it's taking the hassle out of HMO.

SPEAKER_00: 20:16

It's also where we talked before about kind of the increase of blended living opportunities and how we can open up more space through that blended living becomes an opportunity to create different kind of spaces and products that feel more like home. So I think, you know, that there's a lot of great things going on in HMO and there's a lot of great things we can do in PBSA to kind of bridge that gap, but both have a marketplace and a place to be in the sector and both part of the solution in getting more students into home so they can complete their university studies.

SPEAKER_01: 20:47

I think that that will always be the case. There's a bit of an oversimplification would be to say that PBSA should be there and is being enabled by certain councils to then allow students to live in PBSA where, you know, they are completely looked after and bring the HMO stock back into the general market. Now, I think that's too simplistic. It's not just the case that if you build a load of PBSA, all your HMO stock will come flooding back to the private market. There will still be good student landlords out there. I think it's professionalising student landlords. And I do feel that there's an opportunity there to really improve the standards. There's certain bodies that are already certifying some of these HMO landlords, etc. But there's definitely an opportunity there to really improve what HMO looks like. But like I said, the Renters Reform Bill and the EPC legislation, that's probably going to drive the I suppose, the sort of mom and pop landlords or certainly the rogue landlords out of business because they aren't going to want the shorter term tenancies or they're going to have to drive the prices. So, again, this year is going to be super interesting for HMO, depending on what happens with the renters reform bill and also, you know, the sort of amount of PBSA that's getting built as well. So, yeah, it's going to be an interesting time in the HMO market as well.

SPEAKER_00: 22:04

And probably a good place to stop and move on to our next topic, which I think, Dan, you've been chatting a bit about was the Amber student fundraiser and kind of what impact that might have on marketplaces and Amber.

SPEAKER_01: 22:17

It's massive.$21 million they've raised. Now, Amber, they're the second biggest marketplace globally. They'll bring, they'll book around sort of 35 odd thousand beds in the UK, which is absolutely huge. So they are, you know, one of the bigger players globally. only u-homes are bigger than they are sort of i think they're probably doing 50 55 000 u-homes but they're bringing students purely into the uk and they have a bit more of a split of domestic and international students but they've raised 21 million dollars and the interesting thing about it is that they've they've raised it from a place of strength because they're profitable they've always have been they've grown organically or via debt funding so they've not taken on any venture capital funding to date this is their first raise and their The first raise was pretty, pretty gigantic. It's not the biggest raise that we've that we've seen. But that was, you know, student.com. They raised sort of upwards of 60 million dollars over over a couple of raises. I think it's probably 70 odd million in total. I'm sure someone will correct that if it's if it's wrong. But but yeah, it's it's a really big raise. it's good that it was from a place of strength and that it wasn't just a marketplace desperately raising for cashflow because I've seen my fair share of that. And it's not a healthy place for the marketplace industry to be, albeit there are certain challenges. But I think that Amber sits really quite nicely in some of the original marketplaces that have been built over the course of the last eight to 10 years. And they've grown organically. Or they've, you know, they've sort of proven themselves through the various different cycles through COVID. You know, they've taken on staff, they've made sure that they are looking after operators as and where they can. And by that, I mean, delivering what operators want. Now, that is typically international students, but there are plenty of operators that will don't care whether they're domestic students or international students that marketplaces are giving them. You just have to find them because some of the bigger ones will typically this year be wanting international students. So it's going to be an interesting year for Amber to see where they deploy that capital. Are they going to look to really push the US? Are they going to make a play into HMO? Is this a play for Europe? Do they want to make acquisitions? Because, as I said, the positive thing for Amber is that this isn't just a cash flow raise and they're just extending their runway. they've already built a scalable and profitable business. And I think that the more companies that can do that and do that with an acknowledgement that marketplaces are not tech businesses, the better. Because I say it all the time. A marketplace is a tech-enabled service business. And as such, the valuations are very different. The exit multipliers are very different. And I think that, you know, the less that I... Because I typically see most of these pitch decks that get sent to the VC firms from certain marketplaces. The less that I can see Airbnb, Booking.com or Facebook comparisons, the better. And, you know, some of the initial... the first movers in the space raised money based on tech valuations just absolutely astronomical valuations that they were never going to enable their investors to reach and that really set the industry up to fail initially but such as you know you know sometimes there is just no first mover advantage and now what we're seeing is that the long-term players who are you know who've built organically, they are thinking about long term, they are focused so heavily on those relationships, they're the ones who are doing extremely well. And that goes for any marketplace in China and India in particular. And there's a few popping up in the UK here and there. But I would you know, 21 million, that's a lot to deploy. You are then under pressure to deploy that capital in some way, shape or form. So I really hope that they've got a completely free mandate to just spend that wherever they want to, rather than You know, being beholden to an investor, having told them that they would launch in the US and get them X number of bookings or Canada or, you know, wherever else, it doesn't matter. In knowing those guys and the team they've got there, I would say that they probably will have free reign of where they spend that money because... You know, they've built a very credible business doing huge numbers. My only concern for them is that they are heavily reliant on UK bookings and that that hasn't proved popular year after year and that they can spend a lot on Google ads. But, you know, again, they've got the capital to be able to do it. Sometimes that's a bit of a race to the bottom. But I do think that Amber sort of, you know, they spend reasonably wisely where I've seen the cost per acquisition figures. So, yeah. will be really interesting to see where they spend the money what they spend it on how they sort of continue to work with with operators and whether operators need the domestic bookings at the end of the year because it could get to the stage where you know, operators are full come May because there's some massive surge in bookings and then they don't need marketplaces as such, which goes back to what we were talking about on the last podcast, where you can sort of turn marketplaces on and off as a tap. I don't advocate that model. I actually think that there should be a sort of foundation of consistent bookings and then you just, you know, you sort of leverage certain parts of your portfolio, as it were, with each marketplace. But it could also be that there is quite a lot of availability and the operators do need to turn those taps on very quickly with marketplaces. At which point the marketplaces aren't going to turn around and say, I told you so. They're just going to say, you need to pay us a commission for all of our UK bookings. So yeah, this year, more than any, is going to be super interesting. Fair play to Amber for raising that much money. It's a really sensible move by a very good team and I'm sure that they'll spend it in the right places.

SPEAKER_00: 28:29

Do you think it puts at risk some other marketplaces who don't have that level of investment and could push them out of the marketplace?

SPEAKER_01: 28:36

Yes, I do, actually, because very much like you've seen in China, where where student.com were the first to really sort of launch in China. Luke launched his overseas student living, Luke Nolan, the CEO and founder of student.com, and then turned it into student.com, got huge investment on board, raised a lot of money to much fanfare, and really built a behemoth of a brand. But then uHomes came along, Jason Yin at uHomes effectively hoovered up a lot of the agents that student.com were working with to supply the bookings. And that really made the Chinese market dry up. Now, with a name like student.com, they were able to expand globally. But without as much of a source base from China, because a lot were then going through U-homes, it just meant that student.com didn't quite have the clout that it did previously. Now, the same is happening in India. But the good news is that of the top four marketplaces in India are all doing at least 10,000 bookings in the UK every year. And that is enough to offer you a stable, profitable student accommodation platform, unless you are really splashing the cash on Google Ads. I've seen a spend of a million dollars a month on Google Ads from a particular marketplace that I won't mention. But I do think that they've been through enough cycles now. And by the sort of top four marketplaces in India in particular, I'm talking about University Living, Uniaco, Casita, and Amber as the main ones. There's a couple of others sort of coming up like Fly Homes, but they're the sort of main ones. So I think there will be potentially some consolidation. Part of that war chest that Amber have got might be, it might be for, acquisitions, but I haven't heard of any that are literally desperate for funding at the moment or raising for cash flow. It's just going to depend on how this year goes. So I think if anyone is desperate, I'll find out in sort of September, October time when the reconciliations are due.

SPEAKER_00: 30:46

Thanks again, everyone, for joining us. As ever, let us know if there's any other topics you want us to talk about. We like to talk all things shared living, so build to rent, purpose-built student accommodation, co-living, single-family housing, and any that I might have missed off. And we will hopefully see you back again for episode seven.